Egypt – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY

Laila Soliman’s “Whims of Freedom” looks at what gets lost in historical re-tellings:

By Yasmin Elbeih

Earlier this month, Egyptian playwright Laila Soliman gave a talk on the acclaimed play she directed and co-authored, Hawa El Horreya (“Whims of Freedom”), at the American University in Cairo’s Downtown Campus.

Excerpts of the two-woman play were performed during the evening lecture, and a Q&A session followed. Although technical difficulties prevented the full play from being performed in the lecture space that night, the two female actors were successful in presenting the highlights of Hawa El Horreya and its themes of the elusiveness of historical documentation, the parallels in the struggles a nation faces in a span of over a hundred years, as well as the classist and colonial attitudes inherited across generations.

The subject matter of Hawa El Horreya may primarily be historical events in 1917 and 1919 Egypt, but it couldn’t be more relevant to current-day audiences.

Zainab Magdy, the voice of the academic and the cultural historian in the play, tells her Syrian singer friend, Nanda Mohammed: “With time, I feel that comparing 1917 and 1919 bears a resemblance to comparisons between 2011 and 2013,” and Nanda interrupts her mid-sentence, “Comparisons confine the imagination and oversimplify matters,” but then later almost nods her head in agreement with Zainab.

Both actresses were cast as themselves in the play, Zainab being a bilingual academic and theatre-maker, and Nanda a Syrian performer and long-time resident of Cairo, with tension between the voices of the researcher and the artist as Zainab primarily embodies the prior and Nanda embodies the latter.

The parallels between Egypt’s early twentieth century uprisings and more recent events are made especially clear through the line “Long live peace and quiet,” a line Nanda and Zainab, with sarcastic smiles on their faces, tell audiences was chanted as the villages where protests broke out were burned down — only for such violent incidents to later be disowned by the authorities. The tension between these characters only dissolves at the end of the play as Zeinab reads the anti-demonstration law, in effect since 1914, while Nanda sings Sayed Darwish’s Visit Me Once Each Year.

The discomfort audience members may feel upon the realization of just how strongly history repeats itself is heightened through the English-language foreign-office archival document that Zainab reads out, recounting the story of the interrogation of “Aysha Bint Metwalli” who had been raped by a British army officer.

“The colonizer never bothered learning Arabic…This woman’s voice has been completely stolen, and that’s an act of violence that was done to her; the fact that this document only exists in English demonstrates that violence quite clearly,” said Katharine Halls, the translator of Hawa El Horreya, during a Q&A session following the performance.

Soliman calls her discovery that the only documentation of the rape incident exists in the English language “painful.” With a minority of Egypt’s population at the time having the ability to read and write, and an even smaller portion of the population fluent in English, it was clear that Bint Metwalli most likely spoke Arabic colloquial and not the English her story is documented in. There is mention of the fake jewelry she loses after the rape incident, almost metaphoric of the loss of cultural heritage incurred by colonialism.

The lines between past and present are further blurred through the mention of the hundreds of thousands of Egyptian martyrs lost in the First World War, the exodus of Syrians to Egypt during the early twentieth century, and the hawanim who participated in the 1919 protests by stepping out of their parked chauffeured cars in main squares. The circumstances recounted through the voice of both the academic and the musician couldn’t be more relevant in a present-day society where Syrian refugees are far from welcome, where the popular folk songs of the past that Nanda sings in her authentic accent hit notes with our current reality, where young women and men of all socioeconomic backgrounds express “revolutionary” ideals. Nanda may be playing broken records, but the nostalgia the audience feels through lyrics they may not recognize could only take them three years back in time.

“There’s always a truth to rumors and the stories people tell that you would never find in the archives… The Syrian revolution has been happening for three years and yet people still ask me, is it true that Bashar kills people? People in general still don’t want to listen,” Nanda told the audience during the performance.

The excerpts of Hawa El Horreya share a common theme of indirectly warning that, just as the 1917 uprisings were led by commoners and later forgotten, with little documentation of what happened, today’s political uprisings may be misinterpreted when they are recorded into history. This is specifically implied through mention of the violently suppressed October 2011 Maspero demonstrations, dominated by Egyptian Copts, which was and remains distortedly discussed in the media.

Hawa El Horreya has been performed in Cairo, Berlin, Freiburg and London. For information about future performances, follow their Facebook page.

Yasmin Elbeih has a degree in English and Comparative Literature and currently works with Rowayat magazine as the journal’s External Relations Coordinator. She is also passionate about theatre and community service.

Novelist and poet Omar Hazek was jailed on December 2, 2013, charged with violating Egypt’s anti-protest law, a “crime” for which he is serving two years in prison. Yet he maintains more hope than most:

This letter initially ran in Al-Masry al-Youm. Hazek’s family gave permission for an English translation.

By Omar Hazek

Elephant. Photo credit Zahraa Hazek.

I think of you, brothers and sisters, out of love for this country. I think of you at the approach of this dawn which is so dear to my heart, the dawn of Dec. 2, completing an entire year in prison.

On a dawn like this, I was lost in sleep, waiting for the ring of my mobile phone. Then a light breakfast before heading out to the protest site in front of the Menshiyya courthouse. There, where the trial of Khaled Saeed’s killers was being held, we were to protest against the repressive turn of the new authority, which had snubbed its earlier promises and worked to revive the Mubarak regime until it actually surpassed it.

In those days, I was deeply troubled by what we had come to. As I told to a then-friend, I was plagued by the feeling that I was incapable of remaining silent over what was happening, and so expected some undefinable harm would befall me if I were to participate in demonstrations.

On that morning, the police cracked down on us. I saw them beating a young man I didn’t know, dragging him and stomping him with their boots before detaining him. We kept demanding his release until they rained tear-gas canisters down on us, and we were forced to fall back. I went forward again and found nobody but the Central Security forces in front of the courthouse, so I thought to leave for the Biblioteca Alexandria, where I worked, yet I was ashamed of what I had seen — them hitting and dragging that poor young man.

Then I saw the officer who was issuing orders, and so I went straight to him. Before I could say anything, he said, “You still haven’t gone away?” I asked him about the fate of our friend, and he said that the young man would be taken to the prosecutor’s office to begin legal proceedings against him. I told the officer that the man had been hit and stomped on, so how could there be any legal proceedings against him, as a victim? He got angry and told me exactly as follows: “OK, if you don’t go away right now, I’ll arrest you too.”

In this one year, I have lived an age more valuable and diverse than all the rest of my years, with the exception of those great days in January and those few days of our revolt against [Ismail] Serageldin...

I responded calmly that I had spoken to him in accordance with my conscience, and that I had only told him the truth. I insisted that our colleague had been brutally beaten for no reason. Then the intelligence officers around the officer ordered him to arrest me, and a squad of central security came running towards me with their sticks, since their tradition was to deal us a hefty beating whether in the street or the armored car. Yet the leader of this squad took me from the intelligence officers and made sure that nobody hit me, then handed me over to the Menshiyya courthouse checkpoint. There, I met that poor young man, who I later discovered was one of the bravest people I have yet met in my life. I had met my cellmate, Luay the qahwaji, or coffee-maker.

In this one year, I have lived an age more valuable and diverse than all the rest of my years, with the exception of those great days in January and those few days of our revolt against [Ismail] Serageldin, who rushed to fire me a few months back because I was “a danger to internal national security.” If you have read my previous messages, you would know what I mean of this beautiful age of contemplation and liberation, of understanding people and life.

I told you that I think of you, brothers and sisters, in the calm of night when I withdraw into myself. I gather for you all the works of origami that I have made to give to you at the soonest signing of my new book, The First Novelist of the City.

Bird. Photo credit Zahraa Hazek.

There’s a story behind this, one of the many stories of prison. In al-Hadhra prison, I was happy to have the companionship of my fellow artist Sarif Farag, and he had a manual for making numerous origami pieces as well as colored paper, which he turned into birds, according to the model in the manual. One day, I asked him to teach me how to make this bird, but I couldn’t understand how. I thought that there were some barriers between me and anything beyond appreciating visual art, and so I didn’t try to learn how to make the bird even though there were only nine steps to make it.

By the time I saw those colored pieces of paper, though, I had spent enough time in prison to know that much of what we thought impossible becomes easy if we just believe in ourselves a little. The capabilities of a person, any person, are boundless.

Then last September, after I was transferred to Borg al-Arab prison, Amm Muhammad, a man as simple as a child, asked me if I could give him some colored paper to write letters to his wife. I asked my family, and they took it upon themselves to bring the plain colored paper Sharif Farag used to make birds. That old dream rose up from when I’d seen a Facebook announcement for a workshop to learn origami. I had wanted to participate, yet the imaginary barriers in my mind dissuaded me in the end. By the time I saw those colored pieces of paper, though, I had spent enough time in prison to know that much of what we thought impossible becomes easy if we just believe in ourselves a little. The capabilities of a person, any person, are boundless.

In that moment, I decided to learn the art of origami. We were drawing near to Eid al-Adha and just leaving behind Eid al-Fitr. It is the hardest stretch of time for any prisoner, and only those who have experienced prison know what it means to spend the holidays far from family and loved ones in those filthy cells filled with insects, stifling humidity, and impoverished prisoners. It occurred to me that this was the time for colored birds. I recalled form al-Hadhra prison the joy of our colleagues going to the visiting room with colored birds to give to their children and spouses.

Fish. Photo credit Zahraa Hazek.

I asked my family for a photocopy of Sharif’s manual, as he had thankfully been released already. They were good enough to hand over a photocopy, and I struggled to learn the forms of the bird at first despite how easy it was, since the manual was in English and I’m only so-so at understanding that language. I made the bird and began passing copies around, then I began making other forms of animals. Some of them reached 30 steps, ones that I had never dreamed I would see myself mastering or even coming close to doing so.

Two weeks ago, I learned of the suicide of the young woman Zaynab al-Mahdi, exceptional in protests and bravery, overwhelmed by the security assault on young women. I feel utterly helpless with regards to a human condition like this, and so I tried to think of a way to honor her. The eye sees further than the hand can reach, as the saying goes, so I found no good way to honor her — her humanity and her noble weakness before the neglect of human dignity — honoring the requests of many of my friends here to hold workshops to teach them the art of origami during our daily exercise period in the ward.

Who would have thought on Dec. 2 of last year that I’d be teaching the art of origami to many of my friends today so that we can make even more pieces, so that more children can find joy in their colors. All to honor Zaynab, who helped me greatly in moving past the “innocent” verdict that the criminal Mubarak achieved. I pray to God that he lives long enough to encourage yet more revolutions and uprisings in the path of liberty.

Ah, here comes the sun, drawing near to the cells. I’m thinking of you, brothers and sisters, out of love for this country. I gather for you the pieces of origami and warm them up with the heart of Zaynab. I’m optimistic that young men and women like you all will not allow tyrants and oppressors to wound the heart of this nation.

Translation by Andrew Leber.

More from the Arab Network for Human Rights Information:

On the Same Day in which the President Vows to Confront Corruption 18 Employees of Bibliotheca Alexandrina are Facing Trial for Demonstrating to Demand an Investigation into the Incidents of Irregularities Inside the Bibliotheca

From the release:

It is noteworthy that the accused “Ismail Serageldin”, still serves as the director of Bibliotheca Alexandrina, despite of what he is accused of, he has fired the prisoner of conscience poet “Omar Hazek” from Bibliotheca Alexandrina, after the imprisonment of “Hazek” in the case of demonstrating to support the right of “Khaled Said” the martyr of torture, as if the mere act of demonstration was a crime! While “Omar Hazek” was one of those who protested against “Serageldin” demanding an investigation into financial irregularities said to have taken place under “Serageldin” as director of Bibliotheca Alexandrina before the January 25 revolution, apparently as a retaliation, especially in light of such a lengthy delay in the trial since 2012, and then the appointing of “Serageldin” by the prime minister as his advisor, the revenge has extended to include the staff of Bibliotheca Alexandrina who demonstrated to demand an investigation into financial irregularities inside the Bibliotheca.

More Letters from Hazek:

May 2014: On the Launch of Omar Hazek’s Novel I Don’t Love This City

May 2014: Omar Hazek on 19-Year-Old Islam’s Story

June 2014: Omar Hazek: ‘If I Die, Don’t Bury Me’

July 2014: Omar Hazek’s ‘World Cup’ Letter from Prison

This letter initially ran in Al-Masry al-Youm. Hazek’s family gave permission for an English translation.

By Omar Hazek

Elephant. Photo credit Zahraa Hazek.

I think of you, brothers and sisters, out of love for this country. I think of you at the approach of this dawn which is so dear to my heart, the dawn of Dec. 2, completing an entire year in prison.

In this one year, I have lived an age more valuable and diverse than all the rest of my years, with the exception of those great days in January and those few days of our revolt against [Ismail] Serageldin...

Bird. Photo credit Zahraa Hazek.

By the time I saw those colored pieces of paper, though, I had spent enough time in prison to know that much of what we thought impossible becomes easy if we just believe in ourselves a little. The capabilities of a person, any person, are boundless.

Fish. Photo credit Zahraa Hazek.

Translation by Andrew Leber.

More from the Arab Network for Human Rights Information:

From the release:

More Letters from Hazek:

May 2014: On the Launch of Omar Hazek’s Novel I Don’t Love This City

May 2014: Omar Hazek on 19-Year-Old Islam’s Story

June 2014: Omar Hazek: ‘If I Die, Don’t Bury Me’

July 2014: Omar Hazek’s ‘World Cup’ Letter from Prison

Starting tomorrow in Cairo, you can attend the “Doum Storytelling Nights,” a return to the art of oral storytelling:

By Mona Elnamoury

This storytelling night event — at Bayt al-Sennari, Sayda Zainab — is carried out by the Seshat series for creative writing workshop, which now hosts around fifty writers of different ages and both sexes.

The workshop, which is a “Doum” project, has been moderated by novelist Sahar Elmougy.

Elmougy has been at the center of reviving cultural interest in the art of oral storytelling ever since her first feminist storytelling venture about women and memory “Qalat al-Raweya” (“The Female Narrator Said”), a 2009 project of revisioning/ rewriting folk tales from a feminist perspective. After that, there was “Ana al-Hekaya” (“I am the Tale”). Co-establishing the non-profit Doum Cultural Fundation with novelist Khaled Alkhamisi helped Elmougy further the idea of culturally engaging with as many people as possible. Doum’s mission is to foster critical thinking in Egypt by producing cultural material capable of reaching as many people as possible.

The idea of the workshop has been to create a common field among writers to develop their creative and critical capacities and tools. It developed beyond the literary output of the workshops into creating a human bridge between the writer and the audience; the stories become interactive areas of identification and awakening. Away from the clichés of the aloof cultural product in books or in isolated cultural forums, the Doum Storytelling Project assures both writers and audience that they can find a basic unifying ground in which there is neither barriers nor discrimination.

The content of the upcoming event constitutes everyday stories centered on our life experiences, feelings, expectations, and aspirations, all braided into one overarching narrative. The stories seem to point out that as many roads there are — roads of loneliness, union, answers, or questions — they are still familiar and human, and they still intersect.

The first Doum storytelling events took place during Ramadan 2014, and they conveyed many themes, gratitude among them. They were such a pleasant surprise. Preceded by months of training and awakening great narrative potential of the selected narrators, the upcoming event, “Ping-Pong,” is even more professional and sophisticated.

Attending Ping-Pong at Bayt al-Sennari, you are promised a performance that will push you to laughter, tears, and wonder. More important it will push you to think and rethink of sentences that will sound wonderful and astonishing though they are familiar. You will be haunted by questions for a long time while driving, bathing, and making coffee or when you put your heads on your pillows at night. Questions are all that matter.

Dr. Mona Elnamoury is a lecturer at the faculty of Arts, English Dept., Tanta University. She also teaches at the MSA in the faculty of Languages and Translation, and has translated Ursula LeGuin into Arabic and is part of the Seshat continous creative writing workshop and storytelling project. She also writes.

On Sunday afternoon in Cairo, a group of readers, writers, critics, academics, and friends got together to remember Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour, who died at the end of November:

By Amira Abd El-Khalek

On Sunday Jan. 11, a tribute was held by the Faculty of Arts of Ain Shams University to commemorate the life of Dr. Radwa Ashour: beloved professor, author, critic, activist, wife and mother. It was a day we dreaded and yet looked forward to. I say looked forward to because you might have been to the funeral, expressed your condolences, you may have paid your respects to Mourid and Tamim, read the numerous articles that have been written about her over the past month and tried to find in your friends some sort of solace, and yet the actual fact that Radwa Ashour is no longer with us in flesh and blood is very difficult to grasp. We needed some sort of closure. Not that Sunday would bring any definite closure, that was certain. However, those who loved her — her students, her colleagues, her readers — needed some sort of communal understanding that it was time to let her spiritual presence rather than her physical one embrace us as she always did.

The speakers and attendees who were present on Sunday ranged from professors and colleagues at Ain Shams and Cairo universities and the American University in Cairo, heads of faculties, departments, various committees, her publishers, students, readers, administrative and support staff, family, friends, mostly friends. People who had known Radwa for years and years, some who had only just met her, others who had only read her works. Those who continue to write to her, to talk to her, those whose own dear losses have coincided with the loss of their professor, colleague and mentor. It was a gathering of the people whose lives Radwa Ashour had touched and with Radwa it was never a fleeting encounter, but one that would change the person deeply.

Photo credit: Perihan Ayman.

The attention and the love that emanated from Radwa made each and every person present feel that they meant the world to her – and indeed she meant the world to them.

Tributes were sent from near and far: recordings from Lebanon, Palestine, Morocco, the United Kingdom and the United States. There were readings of her works from her students and videos expressing what Radwa Ashour meant in a word or two. She was a symbol of hope, of dedication, of annihilation, of revolution and nation, of resistance and continuity. A musical tribute in her honour was played to the audience, poems read and a beautiful memorial booklet with quotes from her works in English and Arabic, pins and bookmarks were distributed, small details expressing a portion of the love that her colleagues and friends felt.

A musical tribute in her honour was played to the audience, poems read and a beautiful memorial booklet with quotes from her works in English and Arabic, pins and bookmarks were distributed, small details expressing a portion of the love that her colleagues and friends felt.

I could talk about what every speaker said, capture their words and collective sentiments, but it wasn’t so much what they said as how they said it and what it signified. The tiny details of their individual stories and encounters that make up a character, a woman, a person that is a rare gem — a diamond, as was portrayed that evening.

Photo credit: Perihan Ayman.

Stories of Radwa Ashour’s graciousness, the respect she gave to her students and colleagues, her ever willingness to learn, her modesty and humaneness as expressed in the meetings and phonecalls and correspondence between colleagues and friends and herself. She was a compass, a support, a harbour. She was arms wide open, but she was also decisive, unfaltering in her ideals, a staunch defender of the truth. She was transparent and steadfast in her understanding of right and wrongdoing. She was straightforward, a constant that practiced what she preached.

Mostly, though, she was a dedicated teacher, researcher, and writer. She loved history, stories, for tales never ended for her as long as they still had the capacity to be told. She understood us. She knew when to speak to us, when to remain silent, and when to give us a single sentence to ponder even if we didn’t fully understand what it meant at the time.

The thing with Radwa Ashour, really, is her dedication to everything she did, and her generosity with her time, her attention and her love. One wonders how one person could have all these qualities and still have the time to write and read and teach and care for a family and a country where every day brings forth a new challenge. One thing is certain: She is an example to those who knew her and, though the evening was emotional, it was filled with hope and love and a determination to carry on the legacy that Radwa instilled in us all: to be better persons, better teachers, better activists, better writers, better readers, and to always look at the positive, to never waver, to never give in to wrongdoing… in short to be better humans.

We talk of death as a mighty being that takes away our loved ones.

Photo credit: Perihan Ayman.

We talk of death as a mighty being that takes away our loved ones. Rilke believes that if we stand in opposition to Death we disfigure it. He says, “Death is our friend, our closest friend… precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”[*] An acknowledgement of Radwa’s physical death this Sunday brought forth an abundance of passion and love and acceptance, but also a determination to carry on in the footsteps of a woman who stood up to so many adversities in life but who gave of herself boundlessly, constantly, and unstintingly. Her physical absence carries with it a responsibility and a promise from us to pass on the ideals that she stood for and a devotion to everything she was a part of.

How difficult it must have been for him and Tamim to be sitting there in the same conference room that celebrated Radwa Ashour and her works only a few months ago in her presence.

Mourid Barghouti ended the evening with a touching poem, urging sadness to walk out of the door, out of his life. For sadness would only consume him, preoccupy him, prevent him from thinking of his beloved. How difficult it must have been for him and Tamim to be sitting there in the same conference room that celebrated Radwa Ashour and her works only a few months ago in her presence. And yet, with Radwa, Death shall have no dominion, for on Sunday there was talk of presence, her presence. Sadness was embraced with immense love. It was a celebration of the beauty of Radwa’s soul that lives on in us all.

[*] Letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy. Epiphany 1923.

Today in Cairo, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture will celebrate the 80th birthday of Egyptian novelist Bahaa Taher — the inaugural winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction — with an evening conference:

The event’s set to be held at the Supreme Council of Culture (SCC), on the Opera grounds in Zamalek, starting at 6 p.m.

Leading the conference will be current Minister of Culture Gaber Asfour, along with the Secretary General of the SCC. A number of speakers are on the roster, including journalist Abdullah El-Sennawy, poet Ahmed Abdel-Moaty Hegazy, novelist Youssef Al-Qaeed, and scholar Hussein Hammouda.

Taher, whose official birthday was on the thirteenth of the month, is one of Egypt’s most well-known novelists. He was the first-ever winner of the International Prize for Arabic fiction, and also won the Egyptian state Merit Award in 1998 and the Italian Giuseppe Acerbi Prize in 2000.

His translated works include As Doha Said (trans. Peter Daniel), Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery (trans. Barbara Romaine), Love in Exile (trans. Farouk Abdel Wahab), and Sunset Oasis (trans. Humphrey Davies).

Born in 1935, Taher graduated from the University of Cairo, worked in radio, and published his first short story in 1964. His first novel came out in 1985.

Over the years, Taher has had a fraught relationship with the Egyptian state. Banned from writing and publishing in 1975, he left Egypt in 1981 and worked as a translator for the United Nations in Switzerland, an experience that has found its way into his books. The ban on his work was lifted in 1983, and he later returned to Egypt. He later became a part of the state culture apparatus and received the state’s highest award for novelists in 1998. However, he also resigned from the SCC in 2013 during Mohamed Morsi’s tenure as Egyptian president.

Taher has also had a sometimes-difficult relationship with translation and his reception among European and American readers. Although Barbara Romaine’s excellent translation of his strongest novel, Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery, brought Taher a wider audience, and the Italian translation won him the Giuseppe Acerbi Prize, Taher has not always been happy with his translators.

In 2010, he made headlines when he filed a suit against the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press, citing both financial issues and infelicities in translation.

Taher has generally been an advocate of his translators. He said in a 2011 phone interview that he “very much” enjoyed Humphrey Davies’ version of his IPAF-winning novel, Sunset Oasis. Taher added that the translation of Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery, by Barbara Romaine, was “very good; I even took part in it.”

However, Taher said he was never contacted by the translator of his 1985 novel As Doha Said. When the novel was republished in London, Taher said he read it, and, “was very much astonished.”

Taher’s work continues to inspire translations: into different languages, into radio, and into dance performances.

The eight-year-old author continues to be active; this past fall, he led the International Prize for Arabic Fiction’s literary masterclass in the Emirates.

Watch:

The Journey of Hyenas (2013) by Egyptian writer Soheir al-Musadafah, sets the a story of a woman’s seventh-century slavery against the present day:

By Aisha Khalil Nasser

Soheir al-Musadafah’s The Journey of Hyenas nests stories within stories. It sets the oral tradition — which had been transmitted over centuries through maternal lineage — inside written.

In the book, the oral transmission of history is interrupted when the protagonist decides to write her ancestor’s story in a manuscript, also titled The Journey of Hyenas. The great grandmother, who matured through her personal journey, wanted her descendents to benefit from her life lessons. Enter Nermeen.

But Nermeen is not the author of the larger The Journey of the Hyenas. The contemporary story is narrated by her husband.

Journey in the present

Nermeen has been married to Gamal, a copy-editor, for twenty years, but she’s been unable to conceive a baby. This creates tension in their relationship, as Gamal wants to have children, while Nermeen refuses to be part of a polygamous marriage. Gamal can find no fault in his beautiful, sexy wife who is also a great cook and an excellent housewife. At first, his mental, sexual, financial, and physical abuse, which attempts to drive her to ask for a divorce, is defused by her calm demeanor.

Yet when Gamal accidentally discovers that his wife is a creative writer, he plants cameras in the house to spy on her. Upon reading her manuscript, The Journey of the Hyenas, Gamal decides to move on with his mother’s plan to marry another wife. Nermeen, who seems to have inherited some of the qualities of her great grandmother, senses her husband’s change, and pours her thoughts into a second manuscript on the withdrawal of love. Here, she points to the various ways a woman can feel that her husband has changed towards her, and Nermeen insists on the need to move on without a word said. Which she does.

At this point, both of them are off to new beginnings. Nermeen becomes an acclaimed novelist and marries a supportive literary critic. Meanwhile, Gamal marries a woman who seems the antithesis of Nermeen, or “a classic example of divine punishment,” as he puts it. With this new wife, he has two boys.

The manuscript-within-the-book

The Journey of Hyenas manuscript is set in seventh-century (first century of hijra) Arabia, and tells the story of a slave girl who was struck by a vision about the absurdity of war, and who strived throughout her life to convey her message, without much success, in a war-torn region. Deserted by her lover under the guise of noble causes, but really in pursuit of war and women, the ancestor turns into a soothsayer/healer who roams the desert for twenty years and feels the urgency to forewarn her descendents about loving men.

Sawda‘ bint al-Rumi, the ancestor-protagonist, describes herself as an ugly slave girl of African origins. However, her true love, which she meets by the end of her life, has another view: ‘Arabs habitually attribute names, which are opposite to the real essence of things.’ He then describes to Sawda‘ how beautiful she really is.

My reading

Al-Musadafah draws more than one line connecting the storytelling great-grandmother and her descendent: They are both female, both have soothsaying qualities, both are in some sense enslaved, and both live in a patriarchal society with underlying misogynistic views towards women.

While Sawda‘ is literarally a slave, Nermeen is enslaved in an abusive relationship within a society that gives men the right to subjugate women. Both Sawd‘ and Nermeen are not cherished by their men in this misogynistic context, and both find truer love late in their lives. I suggest that the novel explores the theme of patriarchal societies, which have not changed over centuries, and which are built on coercion of women, who are valued only for their reproductive functions.

In thoughts and in actions, Gamal reveals the archetypical misogyny of males in contemporary Egyptian society. Gamal’s total subjugation of his wife, and his absolute authority over her, has been undermined by her creative writing. Her creativity is especially threating to his ego because of his failed attempt to write anything that warrants reading and referencing (19). In discovering her creativity, Gamal has in a sense discovered that he is the barren one, and had to assert his potency. By nature, he thinks, she should be less intelligent than he is (51), and her writing is a disturbance of this natural order.

This disturbance is probably why Gamal moves on with his plan to marry another wife when he discovers his wife’s talent. For a woman’s place is underneath a man (39), as Gamal describes it. In aspiring to be equal to, or higher than, her man, Nermeen is jeopardizing the natural order, and has to be banished.

Luckily for Nermeen (and for Sawda‘) the “natural order” is in the minds of only some men: those who believe in macho power as the assertion of their manliness. Other men, who don’t feel threatened by a woman’s creativity, and who don’t feel the need to remove artistry from life, support her endeavors. Upon listening to her inner self and the oral history of her family, Nermeen becomes free, just like her ancestor before her. If there’s a moral to the story, it’s that we should cherish the wisdom of old women.

A note about language

The Journey of Hyenas is the third novel by Soheir al-Musadafah, who is also an accomplished poet and translator. The lucid language makes this novel a gripping read with smooth transition in spite of the narrator, Gamal, shifting between present and future.

Gamal moves back and forth between his current life with Nermeen, and their lives after the divorce, but the transitions are smooth. The manuscript refers to historical incidents and uses classical language, and tends to be prolix at times. Nermeen also uses classical Arabic, which can be difficult to follow at time, but she masters her tools to such an extent that Gamal fails to recognize their originality, at first.

When Gamal first stumbles on part of the draft, he thinks Nermeen must have copied it off a book from the Turath. Although the manuscript is well crafted, the story could have been a shorter novella.

But, all in all, al-Musadafah’s poetic imagery supplements her theme and makes this novel an enjoyable read. The sensory suggestions and details in the novel are numerous, for example, Gamal experiences his loss as “my soul has become completely flabby, following the departure of my woman” (71). A critic who is interested in symbolism and imagery in literature would find plenty of material to work with. I read The Journey of Hyenas as a critique of the hegemonic social structure that subordinates females and enforces males’ supremacy, privileges, and prerogatives.

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 women in the Middle East.

Amr Khaled — perhaps the best-known Muslim television preacher in the world — has now stepped into the world of literature with a debut YA novel that is already a best-seller:

By Mona Elnamoury

The author with his book.

Rafi Barakat is Amr Khaled’s first YA novel. It was launched in a giant event on Jan 10 at the Marriot Hotel, published by Nahdet Masr.

Even before the novel was available, the literary and cultural milieu in Egypt was on the attack, especially Al-Qahira newspaper, which not only announced that the novel was a “threatening” rival to legendary Harry Potter but nominated it as a winner of Qatar’s new Katara prize. The newspaper also predicted it was going to be a best-seller. Some accomplished novelists, such as Ziad Hamour, said that Amr Khaled would perhaps send Alaa Al-Aswany home, ending his writing career.

Indeed, the novel was in the third spot on bookseller Al-Shorouk’s best-seller list in its first week, preceded only by TV commentator Yousry Fouda’s book (On the Way of Harm) and Mohamed Sadek’s Hepatia. Al-Qahira was prophetic enough: It only remains for us to wait for the rest of the prophecy!

On the other hand, Professor Ahmed Okasha, the acclaimed international psychologist, said — in a letter read at the book-signing party — that Rafi Barakat should be taught as a national school curriculum. Okasha suggested it should be abridged and simplified for the primary stages and left as it is at secondary school level.

The question is: Can a religious preacher turn into a novelist? And an acclaimed one?

First, a look at Amr Khaled’s biography: He is one of the most famous Islamic preachers and social reformers in the Middle East and worldwide. He has launched “Life Makers” ( Sona’a Alhayah), an initiative that may be one of the biggest civil-society foundations in the Arab world. Moreover, he has launched other initiatives calling for co-existence, emphasizing his PhD degree from Wales University, and his work on “Islam and Co-existence with the Other.”

Time magazine chose Khaled as one of the hundred most influential men in the world. In 2007, he came number six in Foreign Policy magazine’s most famous intellectuals list. He is legendarily famous on social media sites: fourteen million followers on Facebook and three million on Twitter.

A ‘Rafi Barakat’ billboard in Cairo.

Politically, Amr Khaled was not a favorite in Mubarak’s regime because of his great popularity. At a time, he was denied access to official media and perhaps was probably forced by that very unwelcome atmosphere to study for some time in England and obtain his PhD. His political coming-out was in 2011 when he shared in establishing the Egypt Party and was elected as its president. But he resigned that position in July 2013.

Silent for a time, Amr Khaled returned with his controversial novel Rafi Barakat.

Rafi comes from the root “rafa” (رفى), which in Arabic means to mend, reform. So Rafi, as a character and role model, is a young reformer. Apparently Rafi Barakat is Amro Khaled’s new approach to the youth, at a younger age than he used to address. The author’s son Ali is now almost at the age of Rafi Barakat, and Khaled made it no secret that he had his own kids in mind when he was writing Rafi Barakat.

Khaled wanted to create a superman, not in the Western sense, but springing from our culture, having our features and belonging to us.

Khaled wanted to create a superman, not in the Western sense, but springing from our culture, having our features and belonging to us. Bestowing his protagonist with special powers like telepathy, photographic memory, and the sixth sense is at first puzzling: They are neither fantasy nor exactly science fiction.

The emphasis is on scientific phenomena. The real figures he brings into the book, like Stephen Hawking, come from real life. Deep contemplation, meditation, and sometimes hearty prayers are tools Rafi and his friends use to sharpen their mental and psychic faculties and consequently change the world around them. Amazingly, Amr Khaled and his huge team seek to back up the book’s educational elements: There is a whole educational website (rafibarakat.com) documenting every piece of information in the book.

The author with his family.

In brief, the story is this: A noble couple die in a suspicious accident, leaving a lonely child who is now fourteen: Rafi. Before they die, they discover his strange and extraordinary abilities. However, the boy is left to his cruel, greedy, and illiterate uncle who tries to steal the boy’s inheritance. Challenging his uncle’s cruelty, Rafi studies without going to school and starts solving the secret of the magical sandy land in the middle of his village. We know that these lands have drawn the attention of scientists around the world, who have come and taken samples in return for money that was supposed to be used to build a big school and job prospects for the villagers.

In solving the mystery, Rafi not only discovers the murderers of his parents but also saves Taj Mahal in India from destruction. It turns out that everything is connected at the end: his parents’ murder, the sandy lands, and saving the world.

So, it is a story of adventure, and a well-told one. The novel captures your attention from beginning to end and forces you to take it with you to read on your way to work, or while waiting at a physician’s. The novel is also filled with technological, scientific, and travel information. These are all reasons to make it a good YA novel.

The weakness is haste. The writer is hasty enough to teach Rafi everything there is in the first book, at fourteen! So, he makes Rafi ask all the existential questions that an intelligent person may ask and lets one of the characters answer them. Those didactic characters include the village sheikh, the priest, his sweet aunt, and even his parents in a dream.

Okay, he is a special boy, but what is there for him to do in the next thirty years?

At the launch.

Consequently, at the age of fourteen, Rafi knows about important values like friendship, work, hope, trust in God, forgiveness, perseverance, freedom of choice, keeping prayer times, motherland, religious tolerance, together with his own special capacities. At fourteen, Rafi does not make one mistake, and does not surrender to one conflict. Okay, he is a special boy, but what is there for him to do in the next thirty years?

Amr Khaled’s team stresses that the novel has been well-received and bought not just by Muslims, but by Christians as well. Although there’s no data on Christian book-buying in Egypt, the novel does contain Safi, the protagonist’s Coptic friend, as well as Anba Bakhoum, a priest and spiritual mentor. In a scene that should be impressive, we see both Sheikh Salem, Rafi’s mentor, and Anba Bakhoum, Safi’s mentor, advising the boys from their Holy Books and, oddly enough, conveying the same meanings. Safi and Rafi are thus “the two elements” of the nation, as Muslims and Copts are often called by the Egyptian media.

Anba Bakhoum: “Love made Christ say of his plotters: ‘Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.'”

Sheikh Salem: “Love made Prophet Mohamed say of the people who hurt him at the battle of Uhud: ‘God, forgive them for they do not know.'”

Anba Bakhoum: “Love made Jesus say of a woman who committed a great sin: ‘She loved the Lord dearly, so He forgave her truly.'”

Sheikh Salem: “Love made Prophet Mohamed say of the drunk man: ‘Do not curse him, for he loved God and His Prophet.'”

Anba Bakhoum: “God is love.”

Sheikh Salem: Mohamed says “ No one can believe till he can love for others what he loves for himself.”

From these eternal meanings, Rafi and Safi realize that religion has never been the reason for conflict among humans. The real reasons for human conflicts, they learn, are greed and corruption. Religion is innocent of that, according to Jesus and Mohamed.

Rafi is a superhero indeed. This is exactly what throws Rafi Barakat to the category of The Impossible Man, “Ragul Almustaheel,” and Adham Sabry: great and popular scientific adventure books for teenagers in the Arab world — no more and no less. This is what detracts from the book’s great potential.

To be a stronger book, we would’ve needed to see more of Rafi’s complicated inner life: To see him as a troubled orphan moving from the sublime to the ridiculous — from his parents’ utmost care to being a second-degree citizen in his coarse uncle’s house. Despite being special and enjoying extraordinary mental and psychic powers, Rafi is still human. Part of his credibility as a role model is to show his human weakness and confusion, then his bravery in facing them. Aren’t these parts of every human’s life? More importantly, these are parts of every adolescent’s life.

It would have been useful to see Rafi learn to control his unique talents, because they are perhaps his real threat. I would have loved to see less relation to the Holy Scriptures, not that they are not valid, but that the wisdom in them cannot be fully grasped except in a life-time journey. I would have loved to see an open end to this story. After Rafi uncovers the secret of the magical sands and saves Taj Mahal and avenges his parents’ murder, he returns to the village and manages to grab the unemployed youth from the café, providing them with jobs!

An open end with a new challenge would have been more credible.

…in his short talk at the book-signing party, Khaled said that he would always be what he was. For him, writing had been a dream — to do it, he knew he would face opposition. But what he knew and taught Rafi to do was to eliminate “the impossible,” God willing.

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Promotional materials for the book.

Answering the earlier question: Can a religious preacher and a social reformer like Amr Khaled turn into a novelist? Well, in his short talk at the book-signing party, Khaled said that he would always be what he was. For him, writing had been a dream — to do it, he knew he would face opposition. But what he knew and taught Rafi to do was to eliminate “the impossible,” God willing.

Rafi Barakat is modeled as more than a novel. Rafi is a star whose maker hopes to make him a role model for a younger generation. I would not be surprised to see the novel turn into a movie, a series, a cartoon, or to see souvenirs of Rafi everywhere. Whether you agree with Amr Khaled or not, Rafi Barakat could be his new project to preach to a promising generation that has not yet been severally defeated.

All translations Mona Elnamoury.

Shaimaa El-Sabbagh, the activist who was shot dead at a rally in Tahrir Square yesterday, was also a poet:

A letter in my purse

By Shaimaa El-Sabbagh, trans. Maged Zaher
————————–
I am not sure
Truly, she was nothing more than just a purse
But when lost, there was a problem
How to face the world without her
Especially
Because the streets remember us together
The shops know her more than me
Because she is the one who pays
She knows the smell of my sweat and she loves it
She knows the different buses
And has her own relationship with their drivers
She memorizes the ticket price
And always has the exact change
Once I bought a perfume she didn’t like
She spilled all of it and refused to let me use it
By the way
She also loves my family
And she always carried a picture
Of each one she loves

What might she be feeling right now
Maybe scared?
Or disgusted from the sweat of someone she doesn’t know
Annoyed by the new streets?
If she stopped by one of the stores we visited together
Would she like the same items?
Anyway, she has the house keys
And I am waiting for her

Maged Zaher is a 2013 “Genius” award winner who both writes and translates poetry. His most recent collection is Thank You for the Window Office, and his most recent translation The Tahrir of Poems.

Syracuse University Press recently published The Revolt of the Young: Essays by Tawfiq al-Hakim, newly translated by Mona Radwan and introduced by Roger Allen. How does this inspiration to revolution stand now, four years after January 2011?

As Radwan writes in her translator’s introduction:

Some young Egyptian rebels from the April 6 movement, interviewed on Egyptian television in 2011, stated that they were inspired by al-Hakim’s book The Revolt of the Young. One of them had the book with him in this interview and referred to it a number of times.

Al-Hakim’s collection certainly isn’t a call to revolt. But al-Hakim (1898-1987) was one of the towering figures of twentieth century Arabic literature, along with greats like Taha Hussein, Yusuf Idris, and Naguib Mahfouz. Perhaps — although he died in the year before the Nobel went to Naguib Mahfouz — al-Hakim was one of the reasons the Nobel literature committte began to look among Arabic-language authors.

The Revolt of the Young, published in Arabic in 1984, collects some of the great and versatile author’s “nonliterary” essays. Published just three years before al-Hakim’s death, it is written mostly in a chatty newspaper style and sometimes has the “when I was a boy” tone of a writer near the end of his days, a grumpy old man ranting about unisex bathrooms. But it also has remarkable moments of reflection.

If one has read al-Hakim’s insightful and genre-shaking novels, essays, and theatre, it’s easy to imagine him as a supportive father — if not the sort who would go to his son’s jazz concerts and applaud wildly, then at least the sort who would appreciate jazz. Instead, al-Hakim finds himself resembling his own stern patriarch. Al-Hakim remembers:

It was on a day in 1935, when I was the director of investigations in the Ministry of Education as well as a well-known writer, that my father paid me a visit in my office. A reporter was interviewing me concerning literature and art. I was taken aback when my father interfered in my interview, wanting to direct it the way he pleased, correcting my opinions in keeping with his own views and beliefs.

More than four decades later, al-Hakim finds he is not altogether different. He scorns his son’s jazz music — after all, it’s not proper classical music — and is bossy, imperious, uninterested in his son’s concerts. Finally, short-story writer Yusuf Idris and some other friends coax al-Hakim into attending one of his son Ismail’s concerts.

“For a father like me, the feeling of anxiety is greater than that of satisfaction.”

After this, there doesn’t follow a touching reunion. Al-Hakim enjoys himself, but he’s still awkward and out of place (“like a rustic in a Moulid”) and later embarrassed at the idea of joining the young people. “For a father like me, the feeling of anxiety is greater than that of satisfaction.”

So it’s all very charming and illuminating, but what does this have to do with revolution?

All the essays in here reflect in some way on struggles between generations: in literature, in a family, and in a political body. The idea is equally present when al-Hakim discusses revolution as when he discusses his views on poetry or literary criticism. Translator Mona Radwan said, over email, that she read the collection differently before and after the January 2011 mass protests in Cairo.

Pre 2011 it was quite stimulating to read one chapter after another by Alhakim about his childhood, writings, his father and his only son, his philosophy etc… His focus was on the conflict between the various generations exemplified by his father, himself and his son. This is something that many of us have experienced throughout our lives. But the collection became more & more interesting with the revolt of Tunisians and then young Egyptians.

She added:

Like Tawfik Alhakim I too believe in the power of young people.

Instead of looking for revolt among the poor and disenfranchised, al-Hakim looks at parents and children. As he sees it, young people are searching for a new direction — sometimes a better one, sometimes not. Although the circumstances are very different, he finds the same is true of young people in the US. In the last chapter, which at some points can seem a bit tone-deaf, educated young Americans put a detonator on the Statue of Liberty in order to gain attention for their cause(s), which include gay marriage and the war machine.

Indeed, there was an actual detonation at the Statue of Liberty in 1980, which caused around $18,000 in damages but harmed no one. The culprits were never found.

One of al-Hakim’s protagonists is asked, on the stand, if he realizes the US is a democracy.

But, if we look past the parts of this imagined memoir that feel stiff or awkward, there is something that could be an Occupy movement or Black Lives Matter. One of al-Hakim’s protagonists is asked, on the stand, if he realizes the US is a democracy. “Yes, I do. But I also began to realize that monopolies and the military are the fingers inside the rubber gloves of democracy.”

Radwan, who said the chapter was one of her favorites, was “frankly quite worried about Americans reading such a piece at first.” Surely, there are off notes. But overall, it’s a compelling story.

It’s also an interesting choice — to end the book here, when nearly everything else in the collection is about Egypt. At the end of the final story, the prosecutor winds down, telling the jury that the defendants have attempted “sabotage of the capitalist imperialist society. Your society, our society that we were raised in.” (Never mind that this conservative prosecutor probably wouldn’t use the word “imperialist.”)

The next day, the verdict should come out, but al-Hakim falls ill from all the greasy-spoon meals he’s been having in American restaurants. In any case, he says, the verdict doesn’t interest him. Instead, we realize, it’s the discussion itself, the process of young people trying to throw out their grappling hooks, trying to reach something better. And how the older generation can either block them or attempt to be a part of the new world.

Egyptian poet Maged Zaher has translated another work by the slain poet Shaimaa El-Sabbagh. This one was recorded on video and has been watched more than a hundred thousand times in the last week:

I’m the girl banned from attending Christian religion classes, and Sunday mass
Although I am a witness to the crucifixion of Jesus
In Train Station Square at the height of the morning
Even then, all the windows were open and the blood was racing the cars on the asphalt
The eyes of the girls were running in Heaven, catching the forbidden rocking chair.

I am the girl banned from love in the squares
I stood in the middle of the street and gathered in my hand the stars of the sky, individually,
And the sweat of the street vendors
The voices of beggars
And the people who love God as they damn this moment that the creatures of God approved
To crucifying Jesus naked in the crowded square on the clock arms as it declared one at noon
I, the girl banned from saying no, will never miss the dawn

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Photo credit: Sarah Carr.

Egyptian poet Maged Zaher is a serial translator. Often, when he wants to explore a poem, he translates it — sometimes posting to Facebook, sometimes (presumably) keeping it to himself:

The works Zaher translates are by a range of poets who work in a variety of styles, and some go no further than Facebook. But translations of Cairene poet Ibrahim al-Sayed eventually led Zaher to his most recent collection, The Tahrir of Poems: Seven Contemporary Egyptian Poets, published by Alice Blue Books last year.

In a recent talk with The Stranger, Zaher said he met the collection’s other six poets through El-Sayed, explaining that despite the city’s population, “Cairo’s downtown is very small, so most people [or at least most poets] know each other.” Zaher further said he began translating the poets’ work out of “friendship more than anything else,” and also as “an act of communication[.]”

The seven poets are El-Sayed, Malaka Badr, Tamer Fathi, Amira Hanafi, Hermes, Ahmed Nada, and Aya Nabih. All these poets bring something different to the collection. According to The Stranger, Zaher “praises Hanafi for her ‘conceptualist’ poems, Ahmed Nada for his inclusion of folk references, and Malaka Badr for her ‘punk, blue collar, angry nature.'”

Hermes — yes, just Hermes — contributed just five poems to the collection, but their wide range echoes, from wartime exercises to childish play. From “Looking For a Feather”:

Let’s decide together that we lost the earth, that at this moment we are lovers of single-use items. That our political dreams are too radical to be held by the earth — which we lost. We went around in saints’ festivals, looking for the feather that fell from the wing of a pixie. Gypsies are sitting on or difficulties and are staring at the receding horizon. Meanwhile, we are like foolish children distributing the remaining flames of our hearts on every waft.

And from later in the poem:

Politicians are also asleep in our military state.
The soldiers are magnetized standing up on earth.
Slaves of gravity and projectiles.

Hermes was also willing to engage on a range of issues, including his name (on Facebook, it’s Hermes III), the continuing subversiveness of “prose” poetry, the audience for this work, how he sees translation, and the images of violence and innocence in his poems.

ArabLit: Why Hermes? You’ll forgive me if I read Hermes and think…Adonis.

Hermes. Photo credit: Martha Mann.

Hermes: “Why Hermes” is a long story, but let me put it in this way: Like all my generation of writers, well most of those whom I know, we matured in the recesses of internet chat rooms and mail groups and forums, late nineties, I had to choose a “nickname” or, to benefit from the connotation, a user-name.

Of course Hermes wasn’t my first, there was Pegasus, and Delirium, but then I settled on Hermes. I was affected by many elements, see, at these times I was reading about occultism and theosophy, I had just discovered the emerald tablet of Hermes, and translated it into Arabic. I was enchanted by the swift cunning eloquent young Hermes leading his brother’s cattle away and causing disasters with his brother’s chariot. It all appealed to me. His equivalent Ancient Egyptian God Thoth, the god of writing, the scribe; Hermes Trismegistus and his lore the corpus hermeticum, Hermes the guide of souls to the netherworld psychopompos and the conductor of dreams.

And as you said, there was Ali Ahmed Sai’ed Esber, aka. Adonis with all his halo then, in the late nineties, for a young man like me who is reading about alchemy and sensing the alchemy of the words in Adonis’ works. It all came together, the god messenger, patron of smugglers and thieves (LuSuuS) and (ro’aat) shepherds, and it’s the dawn of the age of avatars, and I am ripe for taking on a persona.

AL: There are a number of choices — or at least seeming choices — facing someone who wants to write poetry in Arabic/Arabics. How do you see your maze of choices, your necessary & chosen ancestors, the people with whom you’re having a poetic conversation?

H: Well, the first set of choices that I faced was Classic-Standard Arabic\Colloquial Egyptian, and having been born and raised in Kuwait where we spoke Egyptian as a family I heard many other Arabics happening around me: Kuwaiti, Iraqi, Palestinian, Syrian, Ahwazi, etc.

I chose Standard Classic Arabic, a language that was both intriguing and enchanting. Later I had to face metered\prose poetry and while studying meters and writing in classic, I leaned toward prose poetry, a choice that is still somehow condemned in one way or another. Although the Egyptian Nineties Poets surpassed the dilemma; my generation raised it again, and I remember the excitement me and my friends encountered when we went to poetry forums around Cairo in the early 2000s and clashed with our generation who thought prose poetry was nil.

These were the formal\structural choices that I made and clung to through the years. Then there were the other dilemmas, universal (kawni) vs. daily (yawmi), and the choice of vocabulary which until now my fellow writers sometimes think are dead or that I fish out of dictionaries; many choices that you make every day when you hold your pen or sit at your laptop and decide to write, through the writing process and the editing process.

I conceive of myself as an offspring of many and as an orphan as well, amongst my ancestors are Neffari, Hallaj, Sahrawardi, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Lautreamont, Adonis, Shelley, Blake, Poe, Cavafy, Sa’ade, Unsi, Maghout, Sargon Boulos, Donqol, Abdel Sabour, and Afifi Matar. See those are the currents that played my soul when I was young and still mesmerize me with their beauty every day, they are the poets who I would read if I wanted to read a silence-evoking poem — final words, poignant, pregnant words.

AL: Who reads your poetry, as you imagine it? What poetry do you read?

H: I imagine that my friends at least do, my family, and their friends, and the people who visit my Facebook page and my blogs, and those whom I handed out a copy of my two books that have been barely distributed, those who are mainly writers and more specifically poets. I have some poet friends from around the world to whom I send my translations of my poems every now and then. I think the main audience is my immediate circle of people. I read lots of poetry every day, old and new, classic and modern, Arabic, English, French, Latin, and Spanish. Translated, and original.

AL: Why poetry and not prose, which seems to be where a lot of the “flash” is right now?

H: I like the mysterious, the non-immediacy, the latency, the not-right-there-yet-is-there effect to poetry, I guess it must be the stories of the prophets and the stories about djinn and the TV Arabian Nights shows that I grew up on. As for prose especially fiction, I think maybe I will write it one day. I mean writing a novel is always in the back of my head, but when? I don’t know. It might never happen, when I was twenty I said I will do it when I am thirty, now I am thirty and I am not writing a novel right now. so. Who knows.

AL: Abdelfattah Kilito said, in Les Arabes et l’art du recit, something to the effect of: Mutanabbi would have been horrified at the idea of being translated, but it’s basically all contemporary Arab writers want. How do you situate yourself with regard to translation?

H: I am a translator myself, I translate poetry and fiction from English to Arabic, and now I am learning French so I can translate from French. Translation is important, I have been translated into English and I appreciate it. It is always exciting yet perplexing to see how this fish swims in different water, and from my experience in translating my poems: the text takes a whole different aura and significance and reference point and connotation.

It is a game. And I am willing to play it.

AL: These poems of yours have a wonderful combination of violence and innocence, apocalypse and defenselessness. When were they written?

Hermes. Photo credit: Martha Mann.

H: My recent collection of poems, My Beloved Kalashnikov was written during my military service as a Reserve First Lieutenant in the Egyptian Armed Forces from early 2012 to late 2014. My earlier collection, Chirping in Braille’s Way was written over seven years of study in Faculty of Medicine. The poems that are featured in Tahrir anthology are from both collections. I don’t know to which you are referring here. But I can identify with the themes you mentioned in the question, it’s the nature of our world. Innocence is a rose in the hand of an armed angel, Rilke put it way much better, Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich. he said in the opening of Duino’s Eulogies. Sometimes I ask myself, when I reach an exact point, in the rollercoaster of metaphor, that slide, I ask myself when I reach the exact point in a series of metaphorical associations as was reached by say Ma’arri, or say Rimbaud or Dante, do we have to reinvent every and each meaning? And where is the uncharted land of poetry? Has everything been said really?

I wrote once: Only ancient questions are worthy questions. They were, to connect the two, innocent, the apocalyptic visions of ancient scribes, their questions were posed before cell phones, and iPads, and instagram took over the public space. There was barely anything between humanity and the texte of cosmos. Now intermediary texts are separating us from the immediate experience of our surroundings. This is apocalypse, this finiteness of experience; this is what I am writing about in my apocalyptic poems.

AL: Every big language, I think, has an official poetry apparatus. What is your relationship to the official Arabic & Egyptian poetry apparati?

H: I’d like to think that I have nothing to do with the official poetry apparatus, but then, I get published, my books have to be approved by official bureaus of censorship, and given ISBN and all that is controlled by the official bureaus of poetry, then, I see the types of poetry and fiction promoted by public taste modifying apparati, that is by media, and I refuse to be interviewed by Egyptian TV for example, it is a war of signs really, and the poet is immersed in it..

AL: There is also a filmic quality to some of your work. Have you ever considered making filmpoems or poetry films?

H: It occurred to me once 9 years ago, and for lack of tools I wrote it down, it’s a poem of mine titled Cairo in the night of revolution. It is not a political linguistic adventure, but it is rather a vision of the Cairene trees flying off the streets of Cairo. I had envisioned everything in the scene, the sounds, the eye movement and the landscape, then I wrote it down, and it was published in my first book. If you know someone who can help me, be kind and put me in touch with them, I have nil knowledge of cinema and the cinematic.

AL: Does prose interest you? What sort of prose?

H: It does. I read fiction, and religious texts from around the world in English and Arabic, I have certain books that I like to read regularly, like Niffari’s Mawaqef, Bible, Koraan, Upanishads, Buddhist texts, Ma’arri’s treatises of Forgiveness and others, Ibn Arabi’s treatises. As for fiction I don’t read it regularly, but I was inspired by the great works of the masters like Dostoyevsky, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, Hesse, Orwell, Huxley, Mahfouz, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Abd-ul Hakeem Qasem, Bensalem Himmich, Ibrahim El-Koni etc.

Continuing our series of profiles on International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF)-longlisted novelists and their books, contributor Mahmoud Mostafa talks to Egyptian civil engineer and longlisted novelist Hisham al-Khashin:

By Mahmoud Mostafa

Hisham al-Khashin is an Egyptian civil engineer and novelist, born in 1963. His latest novel, Graphite, published in June 2014, made it to the IPAF 2015 longlist.

Graphite takes place in Egypt during the 1920s, a tumultuous time that saw both the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood and the birth of the Egyptian women’s movement. The story focuses on Nawal, an artist struggling to be free within an oppressive, and increasingly reactionary, society. Her life changes when she meets Doria Shafik, a historical figure known for being one of the leaders of Egypt’s women’s liberation movement.

Mahmoud Mostafa: How do you feel about being longlisted for the IPAF?

Hisham al-Khashin: Very ecstatic! What do you expect? I’m extremely happy and I feel quite accomplished and proud to be nominated for the prize.

MM: Events in your longlisted novel, Graphite, take place in between 1920s and 1950s. Why this era?

HK: You don’t choose the novel, the novel chooses you. The idea started not with me wanting to write a novel, but with interest in the era, which sprang up following readings in this specific period. There was a piece of information that stood out: In the year 1928, Egyptian government sent 12 girls to complete their study abroad in France and England’s universities. That was a society that lives a progressive phase and it was the year 1928 — that was the trigger for me.

MM: Does the conflict revealed in Graphite reflect on reality in our present-day society?

HK: Internal societal conflicts are natural; every society lives a continuous struggle between progressiveness and conservatism and a victory for one of the side is always temporary as the struggle resumes.

MM: Weaving real historical characters like Doria Shafik and Hassan Al-Banna in the events of the novel was indirect. Was that on purpose?

HK: I have a license to take a historical character and add to it, but I think this is not fair. Out of transparency, I kept those characters as they are, even to smallest details. Like the scene where Doria is on the ship: I didn’t add details of which I’m not sure.

I can create my own fictional characters but I cannot create actions of real characters. I was also very careful to not to attack the Muslim Brotherhood as I didn’t want the novel to be a part of conflict with the Brotherhood. I didn’t add information about them unless from their own sources.

MM: Women in your novel range from Nawal, who travels to study abroad, to her cousin Baheega, who marries a teacher who belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood. Are they really different?

HK: Actually there are similarities between the two characters, such as submitting to grandmothers’ wishes and that the two accept what they are instructed to do. Even Nawal was willing to give up on her dream.

MM: How do you put colors to your characters and how does that show in Graphite?

HK: One of the things I like most about my characters is that they are grey; we are all grey. They are grey because I wanted them to be real. If I created very righteous characters or very wrong characters, readers would not believe them.

In Graphite, I wanted the reader by the third quarter of the novel to feel that Nawal, (the central character in the novel) is weak and to question that weakness, then to create sympathy.

MM: As your novel tackles women and their struggles, what do you think of female novelists nominated for the IPAF?

HK: I read Jana Al-Hassan’s novel (Floor 99) and I believe she will make the shortlist.

Mahmoud Mostafa is a Cairo-based journalist who works for Daily News Egypt.

IPAF organizers also conducted a very brief interview with al-Khishn, which can be found on their website.

On January 31st, A Dictionary of the Revolution launched a kickstarter to boost the project toward its final phase:

This fund-raising campaign is focused on building the dictionary a digital text and sound archive for the material that Amira Hanafi and her team have collected in the past year. Through one-on-one interviews, leaping off from particular hot-button words, “A Dictionary of the Revolution makes space for viewpoints that are no longer represented in the media or in the Egyptian public. The book and archive preserve the memory of a moment in Egyptian history when many voices could be heard.”

Open to the public, Hanafi writes, the Dictionary archive “could be used for research, as the basis for other projects, or just exist for posterity: so we don’t forget the uprising in Egypt as time passes and things change.”

The campaign’s minimum goal is $2,500, and it’s already more than halfway there.

Dictionarist and poet Amira Hanafi answered questions about the project as it stands now.

ArabLit: Many folks’ definitions must have changed since you started. Will your dictionary add in a time element, somehow move through time? Or is it a fixed glimpse at a dialouge in 2014?

Amira Hanafi: All of the interviews in the current collection were conducted in 2014; in that sense it is a snapshot of dialogue in that year. However, I wouldn’t say that the collection represents a fixed view. Change in Egypt has been rapid. Throughout the year, I noted both subtle and conspicuous shifts in dialogue. For instance, a number of people chose to talk about the word intakhabat (elections) in interviews leading up to the presidential elections in May. Some talked about what they expected to see: namely, a large voter turnout. When that didn’t happen, people’s idea of elections changed again, and that’s represented in the collection.

Alongside my project to compose a book from this collection of material, I’d like to build a more interactive website for the archive that would allow for people to add definitions over time. Online — as opposed to in print — the archive could transform over a longer period of time and come to represent a larger number of views. Producing an interactive archive depends on the results of my current crowdfunding campaign.

AL: Now, four years after 2011, there is a bit of fatigue with serious political discussion. Was there any point at which you wondered, “Agh, what have I gotten myself into?”

AH: I had a few people refuse to participate in interviews while saying something like, “I don’t want to think about those things anymore.” Those were the worst moments in the process for me, because I think of silence as a risky space. When someone says, “the revolution is over,” I think that it is over for them because they’ve resigned from the public conversations that are a significant site of change.

Truly, I feel quite privileged to have had reason to spend much of my time over the last year listening to people talk about the language of the revolution, which has, for me, kept the uprising of consciousness alive.

AL: How did you find your interviewees, and make sure you were getting a real cross-section and not just friends of friends?

AH: In my personal life, I’ve sometimes been asked to comment on current events “as an Arab,” “as a female, or “as a Muslim.” I don’t think I’m alone in finding it maddening to be asked speak on behalf of a social group with whom I am perceived to share a certain characteristic. When I’m part of a human conversation, I express my own views. They shouldn’t be taken as representative of any portion of the population.

For this project, I made efforts to reach as diverse a group of people as I could — my team and I have talked to almost 200 people, including adults and children, men and women, poor and wealthy, in several parts of the country. What I mean to do with this material is fabricate a dialogue from diverse perspectives, in which each voice is unique. I don’t subscribe to the idea that Egyptians of such a class, such a gender, and living in such place believe one thing, and Egyptians of another class, gender, or location believe another. My research substantiates that.

I’m not working with a statistical methodology or attempting to conduct academic research. Neither am I journalist or an ethnographer. Although I may be informed by these methods, I am at the end of the day an artist working with discursive conversations that are not quantifiable. I aim for the book I compose to contain a compelling conversation that represents some of the idiosyncrasies of Egyptian voices, and tell the story of the last several years from a multitude of perspectives. It is literature.

AL: Have your own definitions changed through the last year?

AH: Yes, and they keep changing as I listen. Personally, I found the discussion of “social justice” to be quite compelling, as the concept has a long history in contemporary Egypt. People of all walks of life shared informed opinions, something I’m not sure I would find in other countries. Another word that keeps changing for me is “revolution.” A number of times, I’ve called into question the title of the project, but it’s still the best I can manage. I don’t really know what to call it that wouldn’t be quite cumbersome: perhaps, “A Dictionary of Disputed Events in Egypt from 2011-2014.”

AL: What will you be looking for when you go through the transcripts? What will make the cut?

AH: I’m very much a process-based artist. First, I created a system for conducting research. In the early days of research, we moved quite slowly, returning to and revising the system as we went along. Later, we were able to move faster. The research process then informed a system for reviewing the material. I can’t say now, in the middle of reviewing the material, what will be included in the book. That’s a question I’ll have an answer to once I have the complete, edited collection organized in such a way that I can listen to all of the definitions for a single word in one go. The experience of listening is what will inform what goes into each entry in the Dictionary.

AL: How do you imagine the life-span of this project? Being part of a dialogue in the moment, or having something to say about Egypt, about words, about political and social aspirations, for a wide audience?

AH: I think what has motivated me most to do this project is what generally motivates me as an artist: an urge to put my skills to use to document and interpret my social and political context. I’m too familiar with what social and political activists do with their time to call myself one, although I very much respect the organizing work they do on a grassroots level. In fact, I am an artist, and what I know how to do is interpret information. I imagine the book to exist as both a documentation of this very significant time in Egypt and as an aesthetic interpretation of a public conversation that included so many people in a unique moment in time, .

AL: Will you be translating it into English?

AH: Yes, but that will now be the last step in the process. I’ll compose the book in Arabic first and publish it in Egypt. Afterwards, I’ll compose an English version of the book. This work is not only translation; it is also adaptation, for an audience for whom the context of the revolution and its specific events are less familiar. Thus, the book might require different structure, might include different voices from the collection, and will require conscientious translation to approximate the original Egyptian popular colloquial.

AL: What will the fund-raising support?

AH: Because I initially expected the timeframe of the project to be much shorter, I urgently need funds to complete the review of the material. I also need additional funds to transcribe all of the individual word libraries (rather than only the selections that make it into the book). If the minimum crowdfunding goal is reached, I’ll be able to make the complete archive available to the public.

I’ve also set other goals for the crowdfunding that would support a sound archive, and a website that will allow the archive to grow over a few years through public interaction.

Find out more about the project here.

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction shortlist will be announced at 10:50 a.m. GMT on Friday, February 13 (apparently, no triskaidekaphobes on staff). In anticipation, we look at Ashraf al-Khamaisi’s longlisted Sharp Turn:

By Raphael Cormack

Ashraf al-Khamaisi’s last book, God’s Lands of Exile, a meditative but often witty novel exploring an old man’s reaction to his impending death set in a small Bedouin village, was longlisted for last year’s IPAF. This year he is back on it again with his new novel, Sharp Turn.

Ostensibly set in 1980 on a microbus travelling from Cairo to Assiut, this book explores many of the same questions about faith and death but adds several to them. The bus, loaded up with characters in the novel whose connections begin to become apparent as it continues, is speeding down the road to Upper Egypt when it comes up against a lorry careering the other way. The driver resigns himself to a violent death until a mysterious figure, bearing a strange resemblance to one of the passengers and riding, inexplicably, on the front of the lorry, directs him out of the path of the upcoming vehicle. The driver makes the sharp turn of the book’s title and the bus is spared along with its charges.

Al-Khamaysi then goes on to tell the interwoven stories of the characters in the bus: the driver, the priest, the Azhari sheikh, the petty criminal, the betrayed husband who has murdered his wife, the soldier on the run from the military, the young poet, the girl living on the streets, the mother and her child, and the man who lost his daughter when she was young. I said that is ostensibly set in 1980 but, in fact, it is not quite set in our world at all.

The boundaries between the seen and the unseen, reality and fiction, life and death are not drawn as they are in our world.

This is a world where a father can look his daughter in the face and not recognise her — a world full of dreams and visions. The boundaries between the seen and the unseen, reality and fiction, life and death are not drawn as they are in our world. This is clearest in the case of Sonallah, the final passenger in the bus who, we come to learn, links almost all the other characters. He remains a supernatural, controlling presence through the whole book. Speaking in refined classical Arabic, to some he is an ageless prophet to other a threatening demon or efreet, but he is always there as an enigmatic presence behind the action.

As in the author’s previous novel, the plot is told by a series of overlapping narratives, leaping around in place and time and switching focus between characters at a consistently high rate. At times it is hard work, like trying to simultaneously watch five different programmes on television, but the effort is frequently repaid. The complex layering and deft construction can lead the reader to interesting places.

Let us take one example from three successive chapters in middle of the book. In the first (chapter 37) we see Khamis plotting to take his wife to the desert and kill her, ending by deciding to wait a little and uttering the phrase “It needs patience.” In the next chapter, we see a soldier about to be brought before a military tribunal after an argument with a superior officer being told to flee the desert to escape the camp. Then, in the third chapter, we see a priest riding in the desert in search of a monastic life.

It is particularly telling, in this case, that retreating to the desert to retreat into religion is implicitly compared to killing a wife.

It is nice, first, to note that al-Khamaysi has neatly told the narrative of a retreat into the desert, from planning to accomplishment, across the course of three different chapter and three different characters. But more than this, the wider narratives of these three different figures interact interestingly. For instance, without giving too much away, the narrative of the army officer later turns out to play an important part in beginning the narrative of Khamis and his unfaithful wife. Also the juxtaposition of narratives can raise wider points. It is particularly telling, in this case, that retreating to the desert to retreat into religion is implicitly compared to killing a wife. Al-Khamaysi does not appear to approve of the divorce from life and society that is involved in monasticism and so these two narratives and can be connected, amongst other things, by their place in a wider narrative.

Ashraf al-Khamaisi. Photo credit: Raphael Cormack.

It is a result of the way action, scenes, and ideas have been set against each other and between each other that the book is fertile ground for interpretation. The style, despite the difficulty it presents following the plentiful and diverse stories, manages many successes. In part this success is due to the writer’s unquestionable skill in constructing a dramatic scene. His writing is deeply theatrical. For a book that is relies on an agglomeration of diverse scenes, it is important that those vignettes thrive individually. From the lost girl at the Hussein Mosque in Cairo to the soldier randomly dialling numbers in the middle of the night from his desert base, via the mysterious man deep in concentration on his incessant writings outside the Strand building in downtown Cairo, the writing evokes clear images from the page. The divergent, sometimes rather antagonistic, scenes that the reader must negotiate are done well.

The difficulty, perhaps even impossibility, for the readers of creating from these many narratives an entirely settled picture coincides with the powerful, Sufi-like religiosity that runs through the book. As in the book, so in our lives’ events, saying and texts (sacred or profane) never give us settled answers but setting us loose in a sea of confused wondering.

At the centre of this religiosity is Sonallah with his green Skullcap, flowing robes, and vatic utterances. Following him, it is no longer the preserve of priest and Sheikhs to interpret the supernatural but rather we can experience it ourselves. It is telling that for the Priest and the Sheikh seated in the front of the microbus Sonallah is a kind of devil or demon, whereas for the criminal cast out from society he is a prophet. Of course both are right in their way. He has unique access to the metaphysical which is both enchanting but also dangerous and his presence in the stories of the travellers in the Cairo-Assiut bus is often as dark and threatening as it is revelatory and guiding.

This is not to say that the book is not without its flaws. The diverse stories never really come together as a driving narrative that takes you quickly through its 400 pages, which begin to seem rather numerous by page 300. There are a couple of plot-twists but they are not especially surprising. Perhaps it is a necessary side-effect of the style the book is written in that no such strong central thread exists.

Very few of the characters seem like real, thinking people. As Khamis catches his wife in flagrante delicto and as he resolves to kill her, his thoughts and actions seem somehow unreal.

Perhaps, too, the second problem is a product of the style that prefers strong imagery and a complex weaving of disparate strands: the characterisation. Very few of the characters seem like real, thinking people. As Khamis catches his wife in flagrante delicto and as he resolves to kill her, his thoughts and actions seem somehow unreal. His wife, Nawal, never becomes more than a prop in her own story. Likewise, I never felt as if we were given a proper psychological portrait of “Susan,” a girl driven to the street and to sex with decidedly unappealing men. In the case of such an extreme situation for a girl to be in, this seeming lack of sympathy can feel uncomfortable. One explanation for it is that, as I mentioned earlier, this world we are given is not quite the “real world” that we inhabit. Realty is different there and so “real people” are not the same and should not be seen as such.

Ashraf al-Khamaysi’s writing is, I have argued, primarily theatrical. The scenes are dramatic and so the characters are, in a way, dramatic too; they are more like actors performing their scenes than internally complex individuals.

However, I would offer another interpretation. Ashraf al-Khamaysi’s writing is, I have argued, primarily theatrical. The scenes are dramatic and so the characters are, in a way, dramatic too; they are more like actors performing their scenes than internally complex individuals. This is not something we normally expect from novels, where the drama is supposed to be internal, but it does not mean the book lacks complexity. Even the characters in the book seem to think dramatically. When we learn that one of the characters has a pathological hatred of Christians, we are not presented with a view inside his thoughts to explain it, but instead a flashback to a scene of sectarian violence from his childhood.

In a more expansive way through the book, the author follows this. He does not take us inside the characters’ heads but presents us with a web of different scenes and asks the reader to fill in the internal machinations. Though, of course, this may not be to every reader’s taste, it is interesting to consider as a way of writing fiction.

And so this book a very welcome addition to the IPAF longlist. Its characterisation is not internal and rather than the plot dragging the reader through to the end, it is the reader that drags the plot. However, it is good to see that such a complex, ambitious and thoughtful book has been given recognition and that a writer with such a skill at creating powerful scenes and images is on the longlist again.

From last year:

Ashraf al-Khamaisi on Writing Bedouin Lives, Thinking Globally

‘God’s Land of Exile': Perspectives on Death

Raphael Cormack interviews Ashraf al-Khamaisi, author of IPAF-longlisted God’s Land of Exile (Arabic)

Raphael Cormack is a PhD student at Edinburgh University working on 19th and 20th Century Egyptian Literature. His blog is http://ergamegala.wordpress.com/

For those looking for just the right place to take a beloved on February 14, clearly there can be nowhere else but Beit El-Sehimi, where Orhan Pamuk, Ibrahim Abdelmeguid, and Sherine Abulnaga will kick off the first-ever Cairo Lit Festival:

Festival director Mohammed al-Baaly with Orhan Pamuk. From the Festival’s Facebook page.

The much-anticipated first-ever Cairo Literature Festival, managed by Sefsafa for Culture and Publishing, opens today with a bang: Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk appears alongside august Egyptian novelist Ibrahim Abdelmeguid and Egyptian scholar Sherine Abulnaga.

The festival will run until Feb. 20 under the heading “Blending of Cultures and Communication Across Generations.”

According to organisers, the week-long literary throwdown aims to promote communication between readers, writers, and critics, and also to “strengthen ties among different generations of Egyptian and Arab writers.” Events are set to be held at a number of venues across Cairo.

The festival’s advisory committee includes celebrated writers, translators, and cultural activists from around the world, including novelists Ibrahim Abdel Meguid and Hamdy El-Gazzar, poet Abdelrahim Youssef, uber-translator Humphrey Davies, president of the Istanbul Literature Festival Mehmet Demirtas, president of the Prague Writers’ Festival Michael Marsh, and editor of Akhbar al-Adab, Tarek Al-Taher.

With a little luck and a lack of red-tape interference, this will become a major international event.

A schedule of this year’s events:

Saturday, 14 February 2015

Festival Opening (7:00 pm)

Guests: Orhan Pamuk (Nobel Prize winner, 2006, Turkey) and Ibrahim Abdel-Maguid (Egypt), moderated by journalist Sherine Abul-Naga (Egypt)

Location: Beit El-Sehimi

Sunday, 15 February 2015

The East in European Writers’ Eyes (7:00 pm)

Guests: Christoph Peters (Germany) and Ezz-Eldin Shoukry Feshir (Egypt), moderated by Heba Fathy(Cairo University, Egypt)

Location: Goethe Institute

Translating Arabic Literature; obstacles and prospects (7:00 pm)

Guests: Humphrey Davies (USA), Hamdy El-Gazzar (Egypt) and Ahmed El-Shahawy (Egypt), moderated by Anwar Mogheith (Egypt)

Location: Beit El-Sennari

Monday, 16 February 2015

Eastern Women Writing between Egypt and Europe (7:00 pm)

Guests: Monika Kompaníková (Slovakia), Petra Hilová (Czech Republic) and Mansoura Ezz-Eldin (Egypt), moderated by Khaled El-Beltagi (Faculty of Languages, Egypt)

Location: Doum Cultural Foundation

Kuwaiti Youth Voices (7:00 pm)

Guests: Ibrahim Al-Hindal (Kuwait), Moubarak Kamal (Kuwait) and Afrah Al-Hindal (Kuwait), moderated byYassir Abdel-Hafiz (Egypt)

Location: Cairo Atelier (Downtown)

Writings of Youth Writers in Central and Eastern Europe (7:00 pm)

Guests: Dénes Krusovszky (Hungary) Stanslaw Strasburger (Poland) and Andrzej Muszyński (Poland), moderated by Ali Al-Adawy (Egypt)

Location: Beit El-Sennari

Tuesday, 17 February 2015

Best Seller Literature, Art Principles and Audience Requirements (1:00 pm)

Guests: Ahmed Mourad (Egypt), Hassan Kamal (Egypt) and Sayed El-Wakil (Egypt), moderated by Mustafa El-Faramawi (Egypt)

Location: Faculty of Languages, Ain Shams University

Voices from European Literature (7:00 pm)

Guests: Micheál ÓConghaile (Ireland), Kätlin Kaldmaa (Estonia), Ilma Rakusa (Switzerlan) and Christos Papadopulos (Greece), moderated by Abdelrehim Youssef (Egypt)

Location: Doum Cultural Foundation

Arabic Literature Away from Publishing Centres (7:00 pm)

Guests: Ibrahim Al-Hindal (Kuwait), Mohamed Al-Asfur (Libya), Fadi Zaghmout (Jordan) and Hammour Ziada (Sudan), moderated by Mohamed Shoair (Egypt)

Location: Cairo Atelier (Downtown)

Wednesday, 18 February 2015

Translating Literature into Arabic, Egypt’s Location on the Map (1:00 pm)

Guests: Anwar Mogheith (Egypt), Sohair El-Mosadfa (Egypt) and Refaat Sallam (Egypt), moderated byLeila Gamal-Eldin (Egypt)

Location: Faculty of Languages, Ain Shams University

New Writing in German Language Today (7:00pm)

Guests: Ilma Rakusa (Switzerland), Christoph Peters (Germany) and Ricarda Junge (Germany).

Location: Kotob Khan Maadi

Current International Poetry Scene, Voices from the World (7:00 pm)

Guests: Kätlin Kaldmaa (Estonia), Mohamed Eid Ibrahim (Egypt) and Milena Oda (Czech), moderated bySayed Mahmoud (Egypt)

Location: Beit El-Sit Wasila (Beit Al-Shi’r / Poetry House)

Dive Into the World of a Foreign Writer (7:00 pm)

Guests: Tariq Imam (Egypt), Persa Koumoutsi (Greece), moderated by Khaled Raouf (Egypt)

Location: Doum Cultural Foundation

Thursday, 19 February 2015

Cairo Youth Voices (7:00 pm)

Guests: Areeg Gamal (Egypt), Mustafa Soliman (Egypt) and Ahmed Shawqy Ali (Egypt), Asmaa El-Shikh(Egypt), moderated by Hamdy El-Gazzar (Egypt)

Location: Wekalet Al-Ghouri

Voice of the People: Contemporary Colloquial Poetry (7:00 pm)

Guests: Sayed Hegab (Egypt), Mustafa Ibrahim (Egypt), Mohamed Ibrahim (Egypt), Wael Fathi (Egypt),Maysara Salah-Eddine (Egypt) and Walid Abelmonem (Egypt), moderated by the actor Sabry Fawaz(Egypt)

Location: Wekalet Al-Ghouri

Al-Araby al-Jadeed posted a review of Nael Eltoukhy’s Women of Karantina, snappily translated by Robin Moger, on Feb. 14 as an act of love:

Tunnels feature prominently in the book.

It begins:

If you only read translated Arabic literature you might get the impression Egyptians are a rather serious lot. While so-called “sarcastic” Egyptian novels are very popular, they’re generally seen as non-literary and often are not translated.

But Nael Eltoukhy’s recent Women of Karantina, published in Arabic in 2013 and in English in 2014, crosses the line from satiric to serious and back again. “Many writers describe the book as a sarcastic work but I don’t think so,” Eltoukhy said at a recent book event in Cairo. He agrees it has a sense of humor but it “is not sarcastic.”

Funny books are usually written off as second-rate by Arab critics. But Eltoukhy does not places his rollicking, over-the-top Women of Karantina in the company of contemporary satires, but as a successor to Palestinian writer Emile Habibi’s darkly humorous Said the Pessoptimist. Indeed, Eltoukhy’s novel has many antecedents: It’s part slapstick Egyptian film, part social criticism, and part great Mahfouzian Novel, resembling a funnier version of Egyptian writer and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of Gabalawi.

Like Habibi’s seminal novel, Eltoukhy’s begins with a science-fictional element. The novel opens half a century into the future on 28 March 2064. The world of our protagonists’ dreams has just been obliterated, and all that is left is an unnamed woman and a couple of mangy dogs in love, both of which are killed in the first chapter.

We then flash back 60 years, to a long-ago time when “the sun was ever beaming down over Egypt, the nights were quieter, the days more joyful, and the Nile flowed by all the while. Everything was wonderful in Egypt. Or that was how Egyptians felt about their country. The truth is what people feel, not objective, physical facts. Who cares about physics?”

Continue reading the review.

Also:

Discussing ‘Women of Karantina': A Savage Comic Epic, Relentlessly Ironic, Uncompromisingly Rude, Profoundly Moral, Totally True

Hisham al-Khashin’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction-longlisted Graphite shows women struggling against social conventions in Egypt. But do they get anywhere?

By Mohga Hassib

Graphite is the substance in the drawing pencil of the Hisham al-Khashin’s heroine, Nawal ‘Aref, as she sketches her journey in life. The novel opens with a letter from Nawal, a talented young artist, to her father, as she narrates her voyage to Paris to study history at the Sorbonne. The novel then goes back in time and recounts the events that led to the writing of that letter.

Nawal’s father is a progressive Egyptian man who raises his daughter after his wife’s death. In one of his letters to Nawal, he writes urging his daughter to focus on her education in Paris and come back strong “especially in a community that deems a woman a burden, and plans to eradicate her by her first cry of life in world and throw her in the arms of a stranger; in a way that they call it a wedding.”

Al-Khashsin opens the main action of the novel in 1928, a year that is witness to two major historical events. One is the first batch of female scholars to be sent by the Egyptian Ministry of Education on a scholarship to pursue their higher education in Europe. The other is the nascent stages the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in Egypt. Al-Khashin constructs the lives of the historical characters Hassan al-Banna and Doria Shafiq and their impact on Egypt at the time.

All the characters in the novel are sketched without much description, much like Nawal’s sketches are colorless.

However, the writer is very careful not to add fictional qualities to the characters other than what history has described them. All the characters in the novel are sketched without much description, much like Nawal’s sketches are colorless. The reader is left to understand these characters only through their actions.

Nawal encounters the real Doria Shafiq on her scholarly trip to Paris, and the two become roommates. Doria is everything Nawal wishes to be: a woman with “a revolutionary spirit” who is very progressive and fights for what she wants. In the meantime, we see Nawal’s cousin and best friend Bahiga, the stereotype of the Egyptian woman who succumbs to its social expectations. Bahiga is married to a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Helmi Effendi, only she does not know it.

Nawal is left caught in between the two frames of mind until the end of the novel — when she has to make a decision that will determine her future. Nawal is later wed off to her paternal cousin, Hamed, who is abusive and marries another woman in secrecy.

The novel allows the reader to reexamine the inception of modern movements in Egypt and relate this to contemporary events. The dichotomy between modernism and tradition can be traced throughout the novel, “regressive” thought versus a “progressive” life. These range from Nawal’s internal struggle to pursue her passions to her struggle with her grandmother and her surrounding social convictions. Nawal is tragically connected to all the characters, although that connection is not revealed until the end of the novel.

This sense of loss dominates throughout the novel: be it dreams, lives, businesses, or love.

The novel reflects the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Egypt during the 1920s: Armenians, Greeks, Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived in harmony, that is, until the Muslim Brotherhood decide their way to fight back against the bombings in Palestine is by targeting the ordinary Jews residing in Egypt. The text also reflects the crash of the stock market globally and its impact on many lives. The writer jumps 10 years later and ends in year 1954 — when Doria Shafiq marches to parliament to fight for equality (an act that some historical texts fail to mention).

The reader witnesses the heroine’s life turn from hopes and dreams to dust and ashes. This sense of loss dominates throughout the novel: be it dreams, lives, businesses, or love. But the writer leaves its readers on a hopeful note where its heroine finally decides to add color to a sketch that was given to her by a former lover.

In the end, the book is not so different from El-Khashin’s earlier Very Egyptian Stories, only it’s not as engaging, since there’s not much dialogue and the narrator’s voice dominates the novel, leaving little room to emotionally connect with the reader.

Mohga Hassib did her graduate work at the English and Comparative Literature department of the American University in Cairo and taught academic writing at Misr International University. She has also been president and vice president of the AUC’s literature club.

Also:

An interview with Hisham al-Khashin: Writing Between Egyptian Feminism and the Muslim Brotherhood

Egyptian customs officers seizing books as they enter the country is not a new phenomenon, but attacks on books seem to have gone higher-profile in the last six months:

From the “Walls of Freedom” indiegogo campaign website.

There was the burning of thirty-six books at a Hurghada public library in August of last year, the confiscation of two philosophical works and a novel in September, published by Dar al-Tanweer, and now Al Masry al Youm reports that Egyptian customs officers in Alexandria “have seized 400 copies of Walls of Freedom, a book that examines and celebrates Egypt’s street art post-2011.

This book was also on its way to Dar al-Tanweer.

The reason given by the country’s finance ministry, according to Al-Masry Al-Youm, was that the book was “instigating revolt.”

Ahmed al-Sayyad, the ministry’s undersecretary, apparently told Al-Masry Al-Youm that the book contains elements that give “advice on confronting police and army forces.”

The books had arrived from Germany and were to be delivered to Dar al-Tanweer publishing house, al-Sayyad told Al Masry Al Youm. He added that the items were confiscated and would be transferred to prosecution services.

In response to the seizure, acclaimed novelist Ahdaf Soueif, who wrote the book’s forward, has made her text introducing the book available on Facebook. It begins:

The streets mattered. They were where we lived, met and talked; where we renewed our commitment to our ideas and to each other. In the streets we were at our strongest and our most vulnerable; it was in the streets that many of us were wounded, kidnapped, beaten – that some of us died. But in the streets we were together; each one of us was out there doing everything we could to push the revolution forward, and to reaffirm also – to re-experience – the certainty we carried in our hearts: I am not alone. I am one small part of something amazing, of a massive movement of humanity with a common will towards the good.

Walls of Freedom is a collection that includes the work of 100 artists, 100 photographers, as well as twenty essays by artists, activists, researchers, and writers. The popular and acclaimed book — which was three years in the works — was successfully crowdfunded in 2013, raising nearly double its initial $25,000 goal.

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information also issued a statement about the seizure today, writing that: “ANHRI demands the Egyptian authorities release the confiscated copies and allow them to be exchanged, since it is a historical work and a documentation of one of the most important periods in Egyptian history.”

This comes soon after Egypt’s censorship head was initially quoted as saying scenes would no longer be cut from films, but then clarified his position, saying that yes, the government agency retained the right to cut scenes from film.

Read more about the book:

At wallsoffreedom.com and ArtSlant

Order it now:

From “From Here to Frame” Publishing

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