Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  Their meetings, which take place over lemonade and crackers at the Orient Palace Café, are discovered by Proffy’s friends; this leads to public humiliation (graffiti on the walls of his apartment block reading ‘Proffy is a low-down traitor’) and thus to the soul-searching about patriotism and treason that is at the core of the book.

  Though the voice of Proffy’s upbringing tells him that Dunlop is an outsider and an oppressor, his heart tells him that his generous response to the stranger is good. When he subjects the Englishman to petty insults like refusing to shake hands with him, he is left with a bad taste in his mouth. Brought before a tribunal consisting of fellow Underground members, he denies betraying any secrets. ‘Loving the enemy, Proffy, is worse than betraying secrets,’ (p. 69) replies Ben Hur, leader of the cell (in later life Ben Hur Tykocinski will become not a security policeman, a calling to which he seems eminently suited, but a Florida property tycoon; Proffy, on the other hand, will remain in Israel and write books). Only Proffy’s mother is prepared to stand by him: ‘Anyone who loves isn’t a traitor,’ she says. (p. 2)

  But a mother’s affirmation is not enough. It takes Yardena, Ben Hur’s attractive nineteen-year-old sister, to confirm Proffy on the path along which his instincts are already pointing him. Sent over one evening to babysit him, Yardena cooks him a mouth-watering Mediterranean meal, effortlessly elicits from him his store of Underground secrets, teases him for talking in the clichés of ‘The Voice of Fighting Zion’, (p. 121) and delivers some home truths, including: ‘Why don’t you start being a professor instead of a spy or a general? . . . You’re a word-child.’ (p. 131)

  Proffy does not truly hate the British. He would be satisfied if they admitted their mistake and withdrew from Palestine (‘[At the time] I thought of the British as Europeans, intelligent and almost enviable,’ Oz reminisces elsewhere. ‘We had to teach them a lesson . . . and then – to conciliate them and win them over to our side’).2 This would enable him to meet Dunlop on a new footing, be a friend to him, perhaps even a son of a kind.

  He turns to his parents for support. If our enemies acknowledge they have done us wrong, he asks, should we not forgive them? Their responses reflect the tension in the household. Yes, replies his mother – ‘Not forgiving is like a poison.’ (p. 72) Yes, replies his father – but only from a position of strength.

  Proffy does not know which of the two to side with. Though his inclination is to follow his mother, the crucial problem for him as a boy-child – and this is common to both the autobiographical and the fictional variants of the story – is how to negotiate relations with his father, how to become a worthy son.3

  Without admitting they were wrong, the British do indeed withdraw from Palestine, Dunlop the weak pretender-father among them. The Arab armies attack and are defeated; the United Nations recognises the new state of Israel. In the middle of night Proffy is woken by his father, who lies down beside him on the bed. In the grip of emotion, weeping, he tells Proffy the story of ‘how . . . when he and mother lived next door to each other in a small town in Poland . . . the ruffians who lived in the same block abused them, and beat them savagely because Jews were all rich, idle, and crafty. And how once they stripped him naked in class . . . in front of the girls, in front of Mother, to make fun of his circumcision . . . “But from now there will be a Hebrew State.” And suddenly he hugged me, not gently but almost violently.’ (p. 145)

  Never again, as long as the state of Israel exists, will the Jewish people stand defenceless before their enemies. Finding some way of reconciling this vow, here virtually imposed on him by his father, with the softer and sometimes traitorous urgings of the heart favoured by his mother, all the while bearing in mind Sergeant Dunlop’s warning of how easily the persecuted becomes the persecutor, will be the task facing Oz’s young hero in the years ahead.

  II

  The repeated reworking of the Proffy story suggests that the material holds deep meaning for Oz, rich potential for exploring both his own moral history and the history of Israel. Not only does understanding our past – making our past into a narrative – explain our present: our life, Oz seems to suggest, is in a sense the acting out of one or other story we chose as our own while we were yet a child. A story is thus a way of projecting ourself into the future; and likewise with nations and national myths. (The notion of history as the fulfilling of prophetic myth, is of course thoroughly at home in Judaic thought.)

  In the very personage we call ‘Amos Oz’ there is a strong element, if not of the fictive, then of willed self-creation. Born Amos Klausner, son of a European-trained scholar of comparative literature, the author of these various rewritings of himself quit his father’s home – according to his own testimony – shortly after his mother’s suicide, changed his last name to Oz (in Hebrew the word means power or vigour), and at the age of fourteen joined a kibbutz, where, through a regime of work and study, he set about making himself.

  As in the story of Proffy, Klausner the scholar-father with his Old World culture and ironic Diaspora mentality had wanted his son to become one of the ‘new kind of Jew, improved, broad-shouldered, fighters and tillers of the soil . . . [who] when the time came . . . would stand up, bold and suntanned, and not let the enemy lead us like sheep to the slaughter again’, (p. 18)4 The boy was sent to a school with strong National Religious leanings, where he was taught ‘to long for [the] resurrection in blood and fire’ of the ancient Jewish kingdoms.5

  Jerusalem in the last years of the British mandate provided more than enough action to fuel this mesmerising vision of prophecy fulfilling itself. To the sensitive and suggestible child, the city became a panorama not only of romance and heroism, but also of hatred and violence. ‘My Jerusalem childhood made me an expert in comparative fanaticism,’ writes Oz retrospectively. One may venture to guess that it was his timely escape from the crucible of Jerusalem that spared Oz from the intolerance and intransigence which have marred the public face of Israel. In contrast to Jerusalem, Kibbutz Hulda, to which Oz retreated, stood for secularism and rationality, for the defeat of evil not by violent means but through the old Zionist ideal of ‘labour, simple living, sharing and equality, a gradual improvement in human nature’.6

  III

  Soumchi is not the sole rehearsal of the Amos/Proffy story. Many of its elements are also to be found in the three long stories published in 1976 under the collective title The Hill of Evil Counsel. Again we are in the Jerusalem of the 1940s. Again we have the only son of immigrant parents trying to make sense of himself and his violent times. He dreams of engines of destruction (rockets carrying explosives extracted from bottles of nail varnish, a submarine built to travel through the lava beneath the earth’s crust) that will bring about the defeat of the British in a flash; he hero-worships the Underground fighters; his parents’ home is searched by British soldiers, who are a little awed by the evidence of high European culture; he has fantasies of dying under torture rather than revealing Underground secrets. Even the motif of the leopard lurking in the forest (or the panther hiding in the basement) is present: an emblem of primitive power and specifically of the Hebrew state on the eve of revealing itself.

  Taken in conjunction with Panther in the Basement, these early stories, particularly the third of them, provide an intriguing insight into Oz’s process of self-revision. The third story is given to an outsider to narrate: an older man, Dr Nussbaum, a neighbour of Uri’s (as Proffy is known in this incarnation). Nussbaum is a version of Sergeant Dunlop, attracted to the gifted, intelligent boy trapped in his fantasies. ‘He writes poems about the ten lost tribes, Hebrew cavalrymen, great conquests, and acts of vengeance. Doubtless some little teacher, some messianic madman, has captured the child’s imagination with the usual Jerusalemite blend of apocalyptic visions and romantic fantasies.’7

  From his conversations with Nussbaum it emerges just how inhumanly limited Uri’s inner world has become. ‘Nothing comes from words,’ says Uri. ‘I’m very sorry. Everything is war . . .
That’s how it is in history, in the Bible, in nature, and in real life, too. And love is all war. Friendship, too, even.’ (p. 163)

  The irony of the child to whom words are life-blood pleading to be treated as an adult, to have the secrets of the adult world and its ‘Underground’ revealed to him, vowing that he can be trusted with secrets, that not a word will pass his lips, even under torture, is terrible, particularly when the story is read in the light of the conclusion of Panther in the Basement, where Oz unveils (perhaps too gently and ruminatively) his ultimate question to himself: has he, Amos Oz, not betrayed the Uri and Proffy selves out of whom he was born (or out of whom he fashioned himself) by bringing the panther up out of the basement or the leopard out of the forest, by exposing their secrets to the light and treating them with the amusement, even the mockery, that time and distance inevitably bring? Who is the traitor, and who deserves to be trusted: Amos Oz, author, or the Uri who promises Nussbaum ‘They won’t get anything out of me’? (‘Once more’, records Nussbaum, ‘the beautiful rage flashes in his green eyes and dies away.’ p. 164) To betray oneself, one recalls, is an English idiom for revealing what one does not consciously want to reveal. Panther in the Basement is not a vastly ambitious book, but it does, with a light hand, stir some of the deepest questions about the ethics of autobiography.

  19 Naguib Mahfouz, The Harafish

  I

  WHEN NAPOLEON BONAPARTE invaded Egypt in 1798, the slumbers of the Arab Near East were rudely broken. Egypt, followed by the rest of the region, was forced to reorient itself away from Turkey and towards Europe. A body of secular European ideas – those that had inspired the French Revolution – broke through the barriers that had separated Islam from the West.

  Long before 1798 the Islamic world had been the object of Western interest, and had been fitted into the body of scholarship and myth that Edward Said has called Orientalism. Islam, on the other hand, knew (and cared to know) little about the West. It had nothing to show that could be called Occidentalism, no view of the West through the medium of Islamic arts and sciences.

  In the century and a half that followed Napoleon, Islamic countries took on a range of Western concepts and institutions identified by them as essential to their modernisation. Much of the unsettledness of the region today issues from a failure fully to absorb and domesticate such essentially secular Western concepts as democracy, liberalism and socialism. The question the region faces is: can a culture become modern without internalising the genealogy of modernity, that is, without living through the epistemological revolution, in all its implications, out of which Western scientific knowledge grew? ‘The new outlook [in the Islamic world] is modern in a way, but it is a mutilated outlook,’ writes Daryush Shayegan. Modernity has been absorbed, but only in a ‘truncated’ way. Internally the Islamic world is still ‘trailing behind modernity’.1

  One of the art forms imported from the West by the Islamic world has been the novel. As a storytelling genre, the novel, particularly the realist novel, comes with heavy intellectual baggage. It concerns itself not with exemplary lives but with individual strivings and individual destiny. Towards tradition it is hostile: it values originality, self-founding. It imitates the mode of the scientific case-study or the law brief rather than the hearthside fairy tale. And it prides itself on a language bereft of ornament, on the steady, prosaic observation and recording of detail. It is just the kind of vehicle one would expect Europe’s merchant bourgeoisie to invent in order to record and celebrate its own ideals and achievements.

  The first Western-style novels in Arabic appeared a century ago. Since then the genre has flourished particularly in Egypt, whose civil society and sense of national identity have been more durable than in other countries of the Arab Near East. There the great middleman has been Naguib Mahfouz (born 1911). Though Mahfouz may receive less attention in Arab letters today than he did in the 1950s and 1960s, it was his example above all that spurred the advance of the novel in Arabic, from Morocco to Bahrain.2

  II

  Mahfouz is above all a novelist of Cairo, and specifically of medieval Cairo, an area of about one square kilometre in the heart of the huge Cairene megalopolis (present population: sixteen million). As a child, Mahfouz recalls, he stood at the window of the family home in the al-Gamaliyya quarter watching British soldiers trying to halt the street demonstrations of 1919 (the scene is replayed in Palace Walk). Though his family left al-Gamaliyya when he was twelve, its alleys, with their blend of social classes, have remained the centre of his fictional world. ‘In the same alley’, writes the Egyptian novelist Gamal al-Ghitani, ‘one could easily find a mansion surrounded by a beautiful, spacious garden and right next to it the modest house of a merchant. In the vicinity there would be . . . a tenement for dozens of poor people.’3 (Since the 1930s the quarter has been in decline, however, and the poverty of the alleys is now unrelieved.)

  The novels of Mahfouz’s realist phase, notably Midaq Alley (1947) and the Cairo trilogy (1956–7), use al-Gamaliyya as a setting with meticulous verisimilitude. By 1959, with Children of Gebelawi, this fidelity to the real has diminished and the alleys of the quarter have been allowed some of the fabulous quality of the streets of the Baghdad of The Thousand and One Nights.

  Mahfouz’s realist novels concentrate on city people. There is no trace of the peasantry or the countryside: his city dwellers seem not even to have country relatives. If the city is opposed to anything, it is to itself at an earlier stage of its growth, not to the village. Mahfouz deals particularly with people of limited means trying to keep their heads above water in hard times, doing their best to maintain middle-class standards of conduct and appearance.

  The narrowness of focus that results has been criticised by Amitav Ghosh, among others. Ghosh sees the standards that Mahfouz’s families set themselves as having less to do with Egyptian tradition than with Victorian respectability. But such a reading, with its implication that Mahfouz’s heart lies with anxiously imitated (and soon to be outdated) Western models, misses what Mahfouz, in his darker moments, has to say about the ethic of respectability. The Beginning and the End (1949), for instance, a novel that follows the self-sacrificing efforts of a petit-bourgeois family trying to fund the climb of one of its sons into the Egyptian officer class, and the subsequent efforts of that son to hide his shameful social origins, is as bleak and relentless as anything penned by Dreiser.4

  Mahfouz’s reputation rests – and rightly so – on the solid achievement of the Cairo trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street), which when it appeared was at once recognised as setting a new standard for the novel in Arabic.5 The trilogy traces the vicissitudes of two generations of a middle-class Cairo family, from the revolution of 1919 to the Second World War. Its leisurely pages record the gradual emancipation of women, the decline of religious adherence among the middle class, and the increasing prestige of science and of Western cultural forms in general. Among a cast of vivid characters the grocer al-Sayyid Ahmad stands out: at home a forbidding tyrant over his wife and children, but on his evenings out a wit and bon vivant, an accomplished singer and generous lover of women of the demi-monde. His brilliant and adored son Kemal – coeval with Mahfouz himself – grows, in the course of the trilogy, into a troubled young nationalist intellectual.

  In style and narrative method, the trilogy (completed by 1952 but not published for another four years) and its predecessor, The Beginning and the End, grow out of Mahfouz’s methodical study of the Western novel. They follow the example of the soberer late masters of Western realism. At their best they rise above the scrupulous chronicling of family fortunes and the dissection of mœurs to an unwavering yet compassionate unveiling of the lies that people – particularly middle-class people – find it convenient to live by, with a sureness that reminds one of Tolstoy.

  III

  Like Salman Rushdie, Mahfouz has had a serious brush with Islamic religious authorities. The fact that he emerged unscathed testifies to greater politi
cal savvy on his part, to a readiness to make symbolic concessions where necessary. The occasion of conflict was the novel Children of Gebelawi, serialised in Al-Ahram in 1959 but never published in Egypt as a book (it first appeared in integral form in Beirut in 1967).

  Children of Gebelawi, set like several of Mahfouz’s other novels in a single Cairo alley, is a complex allegory that functions on both religious and political levels. As a religious allegory, it starts with the founding of a great estate by the godlike al-Gebelawi; it goes on to recount the betrayal of his trust by his younger son, Adham or Adam, the subsequent building of the alley, and the efforts of a series of four heroic leaders, the first three corresponding to Moses, Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad, the fourth a modern man, a scientist, to wrest back the destiny of the alley and the common folk who live there from the gangsters who have taken control. The political message of the book was spelled out by Mahfouz in a 1975 interview. The gangsters who run the alley correspond to Nasser’s army officers: ‘The question which . . . bothered me was: are we moving towards socialism or to a new kind of feudalism?’6

  Not surprisingly, Children of Gebelawi was attacked for heresy. Out of respect for religious feelings, Mahfouz declined to contest the ruling of Al-Azhar, the highest Islamic institution in the country, proscribing the work: he argued that it would be unwise to alienate Al-Azhar over a relatively minor matter when its support might be needed against what he called ‘the other medieval form of Islam’, that is to say, the growing fundamentalist movement.7