That Smell and Notes From Prison

by Sonallah Ibrahim

  “The true material of film is the monologue,” Eisenstein.

  No real interest in people. Each looks out for himself. Egotism. Where is the spirit of sacrifice, of consciousness-raising?

  Psychological problems. Theft. The nature of conditions. Persistent belief in the impossibility of a long-term sentence.

  December

  The mouth, like the prison, contains, when closed, living things.

  A story in two sections: in the first, people enter and do what they do and their actions appear strange, spontaneous, random, futile — in the second section, the same people behaving reasonably, or acting out an interpretation of their previous behavior, or of the laws that governed all those actions that had seemed random, futile, or accidental.

  There is a law that governs everything, but we do not know it. Again, the question of coercive conditions, of a power exterior to man. The law of probabilities?

  The epic theater of Brecht.

  How little I know.

  1963

  February

  One cannot say, with the Surrealists: The world is going to pieces! The question of content is not out of bounds to the artist. We can’t keep saying, “There’s no longer anything to write about.” The conditions in our country do not allow it. A hundred topics await. A hundred horizons open every day.

  [. . .] a negative and dangerous aspect. We will pass through a Stalinist experience. The new generation can’t take up politics as a battle of ideas. It’s on the verge of becoming a generation of cowards. They’ve rung down the curtain on the history of revolutionary struggle before the revolution of 1952. [. . .] The men of the regime are sincere, but they have been schooled in fear. How did revolutionary workers come to hate their country and rejoice at its difficulties? . . . How have the consciences of so many been destroyed by acts of terror? The humiliation of man. Three months of terror, January–March, 1959.*

  Impressions of Mustafa Sweif’s book.**

  — Thought Under Pressure (or, the negative aspect of extremist engagement). Speaking about what he calls the renunciation of censorship over thought, Freud says some people suffer an inability to set free their spontaneous thoughts. They cannot renounce their critical capacity. This is because desirable thoughts (the artist’s thoughts are of this type, since they are essentially libidinal) create a violent resistance, which tries to bar their entry into consciousness. The condition for poetic creation, according to Schiller, is very like what Freud says. In one of his letters to Korner, in which he replies to a friend’s complaint about the weakness of his creative powers, Schiller writes, “The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint which your intellect imposes upon your imagination. Apparently it is not good if the intellect examines too closely the ideas already pouring in at the gates. Regarded in isolation, an idea may be quite insignificant, but it may acquire importance from an idea that follows it; perhaps, in a certain collocation with other ideas, which may seem equally absurd, it may be capable of furnishing a very serviceable link. The intellect cannot judge all these ideas unless it can consider them in connection with these other ideas. In the case of a creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in like waves, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude.” From Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.

  Al-Ahram, February 13, 1963, New Tendencies, “Real Cinema, No Actors, No Scripts, No Studios.” Since 1919, some cinéastes have dreamt of a cinema not shot in the studio and requiring no actors. Their idea was basically that the camera should be a tool in the director’s hand just as the pen is for the writer. If the writer can rush with his pen to record his reactions to events, why can’t the director do the same? Why not take the camera into the street, into the places where people live? If he happens to come across something he’d like to “comment” on, he grabs his camera and records his impression. This is what the Soviet Vertov did, followed by the American Flaherty, and then the two Frenchmen, Epstein and Vigo. Why did they fail to establish a school? Contemporary French cinéaste Jean Rouch says, “The failure stems from a confusion of reportage and drama. They recorded the appearances of life as it is, while the real cinéaste relies on selection. When we carry a camera around and run into something, we put ourselves physically in front of that something. We ‘focus’ our lens on a particular facet of it, rather than filming the whole. We shut out some elements and concentrate on others. This is obvious from the composition of the shot. After shooting any number of things, we have a film that might take twenty hours to show, from which we select or edit ninety minutes’ worth. We ‘focus’ our idea about the subject, just as a writer prepares his draft for publication.” Rouch applies this principle to African societies in Abidjan (Ivory Coast). He was an ethnographer sent to Africa by the French Anthropological Society and based on his experience filming the social life of blacks, he developed a method that made the director the sole author of the film and the reality he recorded its primary subject matter. By selecting from among the elements of struggle in each instance, and by foregrounding that choice by means of montage and cadrage, he transformed the camera into a human eye, one that selects from reality whatever tallies with the director’s point of view. In this way, he revealed a new consciousness of reality, one we wouldn’t have experienced by looking at things while they were mixed in with the events of ordinary life. Rouch’s films — Chronicle of a Summer; Me, a Black Man; and The Human Pyramid — forge a new path for cinema, which critics call “cinema verité,” or real cinema. (Zavattini’s experience. Cameras in the square, facing the police station.)

  May

  The Plague, Albert Camus. (Last lines of the novel) “As he listened to the cries of joy that rose above the town, Rieux remembered that this joy was still threatened. He knew from reading his books what the happy crowd did not, which is that the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes for good, that it can sleep for decades in furniture or clothing, that it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs, and old papers, and that the day might come when the plague would rouse its rats and send them out among the people, for their immiseration or their instruction, when death would rip them from life’s happy embrace.”***

  Yevtushenko, “Confessions of a Young Soviet,” L’Express: “The autobiography of a poet is his poetry, everything else is merely a footnote. The poet must offer the reader his feelings, his thoughts, his writings. To deserve the right to speak for others, he must pay the price and submit himself mercilessly to the truth.”

  — After the Revolution, Soviet poets established the Association of Proletarian Culture and made the decision never to write except in the plural form, to always say “we.” At the same time, our literary critics very cleverly devised a theory of “the lyric hero.” According to them, the poet was required to extol the loftiest virtues so that he would not appear as himself in his poems, but rather as a model of the perfect man.

  — Many old Bolsheviks who were arrested and tortured persisted in believing that they had been abused without Stalin’s knowledge. They never accepted that he had personally ordered their treatment. Some of them, after being tortured, traced the words ‘Long Live Stalin’ in their own blood on the walls of their prison.****

  Stravinsky’s thoughts on reaching eighty: “Were Eliot and myself merely trying to refit old ships while the other side (Webern, Schoenberg, Joyce, Klee) sought new forms of travel? I believe this interpretation or distinction, much discussed a ge
neration ago, is no longer viable. Our era is but a great unity in which we all share a part. It may indeed seem that Eliot and I made things that lacked living continuity, that we made art out of disjecta membra: quotations from other poets and artists, references to earlier styles (‘hints of earlier and other creation’). But we used these things along with anything else that came to hand, treating everything ironically in order to rebuild. We did not pretend to have invented new conveyors or new means of travel, for the true job of the artist is to refit old ships. He can say again, in his way, only what others have already said before him.”

  In a book he published in ’48, entitled Organon for a Small Theater, “Brecht rejects his early artistic works as political and didactic. The theater must be a place for aesthetic pleasure and nothing else — though it is also necessary to keep up with the fashions of the age and work scientifically. . . . We need a theater that does not merely make possible the emotions, insights, and impulses allowed by the relevant field of human relationships in which the actions occur. Instead, we need a theater that will exploit and generate ideas, so that they might play a role in changing the world.” Brecht, Ronald Gray.

  Must write about Cairo after studying her neighborhood by neighborhood, her classes, her evolution.

  “You could say that in my last phrase I’ve joined the new realism. Its characteristic features are not at all the same as those of traditional realism, which is supposed to provide a faithful representation of life. The new realism goes beyond details and rounded characters. This isn’t an advance in style, but a change of content. The basis of traditional realism is life — you paint its picture, show how it works, extract its tendencies and what lessons it might offer. That’s where the story begins and ends: it depends on life and on the living, the way they dress, the details. For the new realism, the motive for writing lies in ideas, in specific passions that make reality into a means for expressing them.” Naguib Mahfouz.

  June

  John Dos Passos (born 1896), the total, panoramic view. Journalistic spirit. The city itself rather than a particular individual in the USA Trilogy.

  Hemingway: A tight frame with three dimensions: Simple character. Simple style. Simple setting. In The Green Hills of Africa, he talks about four-dimensional prose: the kind that hasn’t yet been written, but which is possible. There is a fourth and a fifth dimension (the symbolic?).

  Hemingway, The Writer as Artist, Carlos Baker, translated by Dr. Ihsan Abbas.

  — On Africa: “You ought to always write it. Write it down, state what you see and hear, without worrying what you might get out of it.”

  — “Where we go, if we are any good, there you can go as we have been.” The practical standard is participation. There are other practical standards: the truthfulness of the writing, its vital verisimilitude (in other words, nothing that is in life, whether language, thought, or action, can be wholly excluded without some loss to the vital principle).

  — Hemingway’s experience in Africa in the translation of reality. He says in the introduction to Green Hills: “Given a country as interesting as Africa, a month’s hunting there, the determination to tell only the truth, and to make all that into a book — can such a book compete with a work of the imagination?” The answer is that it certainly can, provided the writer is skilled, as well as being committed to both truth and beauty — in other words, the way it was + formal construction. Yet the experiment also proved that the writer who takes no liberties with the events of his experience, who tells things exactly as they were and invents nothing, will place himself at a disadvantage in this competition [the intensity of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Life of Francis Macomber”]. This book and the two stories established one aesthetic principle firmly in Hemingway’s mind: The highest art must take liberties, not with the truth but with the modes by which truth is translated.

  — Hemingway and politics: “A writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it from the inside, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed . . . But none of this will help him as a writer unless he finds something new to add to human knowledge through his writing.”

  — “All bad writers are in love with the epic.”

  Eliot to the American poet Donald Hall, in an interview from ’59, published in The Paris Review: “I think that for me it’s been very useful to exercise other activities, such as working in a bank, or publishing even. And I think also that the difficulty of not having as much time as I would like has given me a greater pressure of concentration. I mean it has prevented me from writing too much. The danger, as a rule, of having nothing else to do is that one might write too much rather than concentrating and perfecting smaller amounts.”

  July

  On the night of July 13, ’63, I came across the text of a letter I intended to send to my sister. I think constantly of writing to her about my real feelings toward her and of describing many things. But my letters to her travel in more than one direction before they arrive. My sense that someone might read them and smile at their naïveté paralyzes me, as does the thought of meeting someone who had read these letters and could be looking at me and laughing to himself without my knowing. Although actually other people don’t care about your sentimentality. The thought that this might be the story of my life.

  Is the real problem in art the problem of form? Can we say that the basis of art is form? This doesn’t mean we’re against content. Form without content is meaningless. (The content of abstract painting is found in the sensations experienced by the self when stimulated by a certain arrangement of colors.) The artist at work is not motivated, in the first place, by a strict idea, but rather by forms and styles. It is by virtue of his working through these forms and styles that the content emerges (the opposite might also occur). In backward societies, or one in which art enjoys a mass audience while it is still culturally backward (Russia at the time of the Revolution), a direct style is necessary and valid. . . . When the cultural level is higher, when life has become more complex and intellectual development has progressed, the need for more depth — for new forms and styles, for an increasing variety and profundity of each art’s creative elements — becomes urgent. (In narrative: memory, experience, symbol, style, scientific awareness.)

  If I wanted to describe a picture of my sister when she was young and innocent and wide-eyed and full of possibility — a picture of her wearing a pink skirt with a white spot marking the slight swell of her chest, a trace of sweat above her shoulders — can words succeed in describing her, in translating the feeling that digs into my chest? Film can do it better. So another way must be sought, beyond the snapshot, to capture this feeling in words.

  August

  The mood in the prison has become unbearable. Terrible noise. I can’t sleep at night or in the afternoon. I wish the prisoners were gone. I don’t know how to work; I’m constantly depressed and nothing changes my mood except reading a good story or something about the writer’s craft. I’m confident I know how to write, but what nearly destroys me is not knowing the level of writer I’ll become. Many thoughts run through my head, which I want to express but can’t. I don’t know how to express my thoughts clearly in speech. If I try to write them down, the thoughts run away.

  When we express ourselves, we also express the collective. A fence gleaning.***** What is shared by these collectives: boredom, disgust, disillusionment. The romanticism of struggle is over. What remains are t
he utterly naked facts. The cult of personality and its collapse. Rethinking of everything. The masks are off (the mask of religion, the mask of heroism . . . ).

  Eye of the child: “Human nature seeks constantly to know the world around it, but the desire decreases over time. As we grow older the world loses its beauty and brilliance, but we can reclaim our acuity of vision, the sunrise of the world, by way of the child who observes the world around him with wide and curious eyes.”

  September

  September 2, afternoon: I dreamed of my father. He was walking and he put his arm around my shoulder and embraced me. He seemed strong, solid. He complained to me about the troubles and pains of last year. I told him that as for myself, I’d been in pain since turning eighteen. It made me happy to complain to him and expect some kind of relief. But he pointed to the crowded tram and said, smiling kindly, “They’re going to pick each other’s pockets,” and I realized he wanted to change the subject. Then he disappeared and Adel H. took his place.****** We walked next to each other with his arm on my shoulder and I began to complain to him, too. He sympathized, then left me when we reached a playing field. I was angry, because he had listened to me only so that I’d accompany him to the playing field, not because he was especially interested in what I was saying. I went away, after taking his towel in revenge. I woke up and felt happy about seeing my father. I recalled my feelings of delight, gladness, comfort at being able to complain to him and have his help. I thought, if only there were no science of dreams. How wonderful it would have been if this were a visit from my father’s spirit — a consolation, a prophecy!