These developments, hardly noticed by Zaat herself, are introduced in the form of cuttings from various Egyptian, Arab and international newspapers and magazines, which are interleaved between the novel’s chapters. Following the narrator’s description of Zaat’s early married life, for example, the reader is presented with a chapter entirely composed of press clippings. Plucking these out of context and rearranging them with others gives these a kind of mordant humour they presumably did not originally possess, a comment from the Cairo daily al-Akhbar, for example, ‘only a complete recovery of moral standards will pull Egypt out of its economic crisis’, appearing with an estimate of the wealth of Esmat El Sadat, a relative of the late president, ‘accumulated over 16 years working as a driver,’ at 125 million Egyptian pounds (around GBP 12 million at today’s values).
Zaat has been widely commented upon, some considering that Ibrahim’s aim is to suggest that consumerism, like some other features of modern Arab society, ‘encourages passivity’, and seeing in the novel criticism of the sort contained in Ibrahim’s earlier short stories, such as ‘Across Three Beds in the Afternoon’.9 In this piece, the protagonists spend most of their time sleeping, when they are not watching television. This story, like Zaat, suggests the ways in which a political situation that Ibrahim has characterized as a kind of mix of a lack of popular participation with comprador capitalism can be maintained. However that may be, at the very least Zaat contains some startling material relating to the scale of corruption in contemporary Egypt and beyond. While one might have doubts about how far this can be made sense of in translation, since the English version, like the Arabic original,10 gives only minimal details of the clippings provided and does not go very far in identifying the persons concerned, Ibrahim’s ‘cut-and-paste’ technique is a remarkable innovation in the Arabic novel.
In other works not available in English, Ibrahim has continued the literary project announced in the 1960s. In Beirut, Beirut, for example, he turns his attention to the Arab publishing industry, the protagonist travelling to Beirut in order to publish a novel that in one way or another offends ‘almost all’ Arab regimes.11 This novel allows Ibrahim to comment on the situation of the writer in the Arab world, while also writing about the civil war in Lebanon. While Beirut, Beirut is perhaps a writer’s novel, or at least a novel about the travails of being a writer, later novels like Sharaf and Amrikanli return to more familiar territory.12 In the former, a young man, idling about the streets gazing at consumer goods he cannot afford, is subjected to a sexual assault at the hands of a wealthy foreigner. Ibrahim may want to see in this an indication of the ways in which Arab populations are invited to prostitute themselves, potentially or actually, to foreign capital, though for at least one critic the novel misfires.13 The latter novel is the story of an Egyptian academic invited to lecture in the United States at the height of the Monica Lewinski crisis. Though the American university environment is uncongenial to him, the atmosphere at his home university in Cairo is little better, with academic careers being made or broken by how closely individuals are able to conform to dominant religious trends. A recent memoir, a kind of pre-history of The Smell of It, has also appeared in Cairo under the title ‘Voyeurism’.14 Though Ibrahim’s novels have been getting longer and longer, losing some of the directness of The Smell of It, he remains an author to watch.
Gamal al-Ghitany is also a prominent member of the generation of the 1960s, but his writing is very different from Ibrahim’s. While the latter has adopted an explicitly political stance, al-Ghitany has made his reputation through research into pre-modern Arabic literary materials, and his politics, though deeply felt, are rather more concealed. Al-Ghitany is also a journalist and editor of the weekly Akhbar al-Adab, one of the few literary reviews for a general audience available in Arabic, which is published by the Cairo paper al-Akhbar. His best-known novel, one of only two titles translated into English from perhaps a dozen or so published works, is Zayni Barakat,15 this text exemplifying its author’s wider literary procedures.
Al-Ghitany first came to prominence in the late 1960s, when, like many other writers of his generation, he published material in Gallery 68, the literary showcase of the time edited by an editorial committee including the novelist and critic Edwar al-Kharrat. (The latter’s work is discussed below.) A first collection of short stories appeared in 1969 entitled Papers of a Young Man Who Lived One Thousand Years Ago, among them a story purportedly referring to events in the al-Maqshara prison in Cairo during the medieval period and told in the language of the time.16 This experiment al-Ghitany then reworked in novel form to produce Zayni Barakat, published in Arabic in 1973 and subsequently translated into most European languages. The historical Zayni Barakat ibn Musa held the office of muhtasib, or markets inspector, during the final decades of the Mamluk state in Egypt, managing to retain the post after the Ottoman takeover in 1517 and surviving both the country’s last Mamluk sultan and its first Ottoman ruler.17 In the novel, as its translator points out, he is portrayed as ‘the quintessential opportunist and sinister manipulator’, a kind of power behind the throne whose charismatic influence allows him to outmanoeuvre all rivals. The ‘most striking impression’ made by the novel’s source text, a history by Muhammad ibn Iyas (1448–c.1522), is that Zayni Barakat ‘is a survivor’.
Barakat is the leader of a drive to restore moral order reminiscent of Angelo’s campaign in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Like the latter, ‘a man whose blood/Is snow broth [… and] who never feels/The wanton stings and motions of the sense,’ he is apparently incorruptible, and his success is advertised as due to ‘his virtue and integrity, his honesty and righteousness, his strength and firmness, [and] his revered respectability.’ Whereas Angelo is a revolting hypocrite, Barakat turns out to be a man for all seasons, and al-Ghitany’s narrative method, which mixes reports by a fictional Venetian traveller, Visconti Gianti, with letters, proclamations, and other documents written in the language of the time, adds up to a kind of polyphonic portrait of the man. We shall probably never know whether Shakespeare, writing under the censorship conditions of his time, intended to make some particular point in his portrait of Angelo. Al-Ghitany, however, almost certainly means his readers to be reminded of a particular individual through his portrait of Barakat, as was the case in many other literary subterfuges at the time.18 This individual, like Barakat, was ‘a man of unknown origin, without roots, on whom fortune suddenly smiled and who claimed that he was going to establish justice on earth’, and Edward Said spells out the ‘correspondence’ in his foreword to the English translation: ‘al-Ghitani’s disenchanted reflections upon the past directly associate Zayni’s role with the murky atmosphere of intrigue, conspiracy and multiple schemes that characterized Abdel Nasser’s rule in the 1960s,’ which nevertheless survived defeat in 1967. Though the parallels are not exact, they are close enough, and Zayni’s charismatic control over the population, his populism and his temporary disappearance following news of the defeat of the Sultan’s armies by the Ottomans are enough to make the connection with Nasser.
These two paths, ‘exaggerated realism’ on the one hand, giving way to politically aware experiment and a critical re-functioning of techniques taken from the pre-modern Arab literary heritage on the other, have provided models for many other writers. However, the two trajectories do not exhaust the possibilities available, and other writers have opened up distinct paths for themselves. Edwar al-Kharrat, for example, has looked to Proust for inspiration in works such as Rama and the Dragon, City of Saffron and Girls of Alexandria, published comparatively late in life from the 1980s onwards.19 He has also produced critical work that acts as a kind of commentary on the kinds of ‘new writing’ with which he is associated.
Al-Kharrat was born in 1926 in Alexandria, and during his student years he was involved in radical left-wing politics, leading to his imprisonment between 1948 and 1950. Following a career spent in the cultural bureaucracy, he published his first novel, Rama and t
he Dragon, in 1979, going on to publish over a dozen other works in the decades that followed. In his critical writings, al-Kharrat is ambivalent towards the ‘committed’ literature that became fashionable in the 1950s. In the wake of the work of al-Sharqawi and Idris, discussed in Chapter 3, which marked a new and ‘genuine concern for the vast poverty-stricken inarticulate mass of the people’ and went hand in hand with the development hopes of the day, there came a ‘growing swell of pompous works of literature that dubbed themselves “socialist” and “realist”, he says, yet which in fact were crudely rhetorical,’ their characters merely stereotypes (‘effigies’) in the manner familiar from Soviet-style ‘socialist realism’. Such work, al-Kharrat thinks, was aesthetically or philosophically naïve, since it took for granted ‘that it was possible and even desirable to portray, or reflect, that is, to represent, the reality in literature’. As a result, reality and representation became linked together in a vicious circle, such that only what could be described in realist style was considered the legitimate content of literature, and literature, far from suggesting new ways of thinking, merely reflected and endorsed the official version of things.20
For al-Kharrat literature should aim at ‘widening the scope of “reality”’, rather than simply representing how it appears, and it should be engaged in a work of ‘constant questioning’. While this may or may not also be an important consideration, the ‘new writing’ for which he has argued has had an authenticity component in that, he says, ‘the Arab literary mind was nurtured on the epic [and] the frankly phantasmagorical,’ and the new writing can be understood as drawing on this ‘rich heritage … while reaping the benefits of the modernist achievements of the West.’ Debates of this sort about the merits of realism and other forms of writing are familiar to students of earlier modernist experiments in Europe, al-Kharrat’s strictures on realism, for example, recapitulating attacks made by modernist intellectuals on the kind of writing favoured by Marxist critics with a penchant for realism, such as Lukács.21 What is of interest here, however, is not so much the provenance of al-Kharrat’s ideas, their ‘reaping the benefits of the modernist achievements of the West’, as the ways in which such thinking has found its way into the aesthetics of the Arabic novel and his own novels in particular.
He has drawn up a typology of the kinds of ‘new writing’ he favours, going from a writing that, like some modernist experiments, seeks to convey the ‘entire inner life’ in the form of a subjectivism similar to ‘stream-of-consciousness’ writing styles, to a writing that, rather in the manner of the objectivism favoured by Ibrahim, magnifies the ‘alienation, or the estrangement of man’ from the events around him. There is also what al-Kharrat calls a ‘contemporary mythical current’ that draws instead on legends or re-functioned historical and pre-modern materials in the different manners of al-Ghitany in Zayni Barakat or Salih in Bandarshah. Perhaps al-Kharrat’s own novels are best understood in terms of the first of these alternatives, since they are typically concerned to convey the ‘entire inner life’, including the life of memory. City of Saffron, for example, a collection of ‘Alexandrian texts’, is set in the 1930s in Alexandria, and it consists of the boyhood memories of the first-person narrator, Mikha’il, who grew up in the city. Each of the nine ‘texts’ making up the novel is built around an image – ‘Billowing White Clouds’ is the picture with which the book begins – and each of these images connects, rather in the manner of the ‘involuntary memory’ described by Proust, with a whole tissue of past experience. Moreover, Mikha’il’s remembered experience might be taken to be linked with that of al-Kharrat: both the narrator of City of Saffron and its author went to school and university in Alexandria; both were raised in difficult circumstances following the deaths of their fathers; both were obliged to work to support their studies, Mikha’il in the novel describing work in the British naval depot at Alexandria during the Second World War, when the German army led by Rommel was almost at the city’s gates.
Mikha’il sees his past in indulgent terms, and he reflects on ‘this obsession of yours – tinged as it is with irony – with that which has perished, which has been effaced’. Perhaps al-Kharrat’s aim in the novel is to reconstruct that ‘perished’ city, the Alexandria of his childhood, in linguistic form, a sort of ‘virtual’ city of saffron to make up for the real one that time has swept away. If so, then this is a project he continues in another novel, Girls of Alexandria, which reproduces the memories of a slightly older Mikha’il, again in nine named sections. According to the English translator of the two books, City of Saffron and Girls of Alexandria are ‘two excursions into a discourse which continues unbroken … [The text] illustrates the tension between transient surface experience and the unending dream of life which underpins it.’ As in the earlier novel, Mikha’il takes an ironic view of his younger self, of the young man who would order ‘Marxist and Trotskyite books and periodicals … direct from the publishers’ in Europe and America, having them delivered to a post office address in Manshiya, a district of Alexandria. ‘My belief in life then,’ he explains, ‘was that Revolution could not dispense with aesthetics …’
As far as ‘transient surface experience’ is concerned, the later novel records some of the ‘most important event[s] in our recent history’, but only as these are witnessed by Mikha’il out of the corner of his eye. Once, changing buses in front of the Cecil Hotel, for example, ‘I saw the tanks, armoured cars and troop carriers clattering along the Corniche’ to Ras al-Tin Palace to arrest the king (in the 1952 Revolution); earlier there had been the ‘long black Packard’ car ‘belonging to the young Prince Muhammad Reza Pahlavi’, later Shah of Iran, on his way to marry Princess Fawzia (in 1939); and later there is ‘the deep magical voice which had for so long intoxicated millions and filled their breasts with elation … “lift up your head, brother, for the age of colonialism has passed”’ (the voice is that of Nasser bidding farewell to British colonialism).
In concluding this chapter something should be said about developments in poetry and drama. While the free verse of the 1950s and 1960s has been widely translated, non-Arabic-speaking readers have been less well served as far as contemporary poetry is concerned. Only some major trends have been picked out in what follows, together with the work of poets available in translation.
In the 1970s, Arabic poetry entered a period of crisis. Earlier poets such as al-Mala’ika, al-Sayyab and, predominantly, Adonis, had brought about major changes in the forms and language of Arabic poetry, but as a result poetry exhibited a kind of paradox: while on the one hand it had cast off traditional rhetoric in favour of language that was closer to that of educated speech, on the other it had absorbed many of the lessons of European modernist poetry, al-Sayyab borrowing from T. S. Eliot and Edith Sitwell (oddly for English readers) and Adonis finding inspiration in the work of the French surrealists, whose ‘revolutionary’ poetic programme he adopted. Arabic poetry now sounded more ‘modern’ and conformed more closely to international norms. However, it also sounded more elitist and more off-putting to ordinary readers. ‘A whole generation of poets from Bahrain and Yemen to Morocco sank deeper and deeper into inventiveness for its own sake, unguided by any informed criticism,’ writes one critic. By the beginning of the 1980s, ‘a large amount of bad poetry had accumulated’, some of it marked by experiment for its own sake, some of it loudly attitudinizing in the manner of ‘platform poetry’.22
Among this material there was nevertheless more modest work, poetry, in other words, that reacted against the grandstanding of the earlier generation by choosing deliberate, anti-heroic deflation. One might think, in British terms, of the puncturing of reputations carried out by the poets associated with ‘the Movement’ in the 1950s, who were unable to bear what they saw as the posturing of their immediate forebears. The Egyptian poet Salah Abd al-Sabur is an example of a poet who wrote in a more ironical, self-critical tone, the Iraqi Sa’di Yusuf another. One might point, too, to the poetry of the Egyptians Amal Dunqul,
Ahmad Abd al-Mu’ti Hegazi and Muhammad Afifi Matar, all of whose work departed in one way or another from what had come before it. The latter has the reputation of being a formidably ‘difficult’ poet, his work marked by a ‘rich intricacy and wonderful strangeness’ and ‘appealing to connoisseur readers rather than the general Arab public,’ in the words of his translators.23 These poets, like those discussed earlier, write in the ‘classical’ language, in other words in the Arabic generally used throughout the Arab world for written materials and in formal speech. Yet, the post-war period also saw developments in poetry written in the colloquial, the local Arabic vernacular or dialect, and some of the best-known poets writing in Egypt, for example, have written in the local dialect, though they have not always been recognized by the critics. Such poets include Salah Jahine, Fu’ad Haddad, Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm and Abd al-Rahman al-Abnoudi.
Both Jahine and Haddad began to write in the 1950s, and both looked for inspiration to the vernacular poetry written by the earlier Egyptian poet Bairam al-Tunsi. However, both poets invested their work with aesthetic and political dimensions that poetry in the vernacular had perhaps not previously had: Haddad in particular, of Levantine origin and at home in both French and Arab culture, could hardly be described as ‘untutored’ despite his choice of the vernacular language, and Jahine used the dialect as a way of mobilizing popular support behind Nasser’s policies (which he enthusiastically supported) and finding new audiences for poetry. His best-known work includes the Ruba’iyyat (Quatrains) and the ‘Songs of the Revolution’ in support of the Nasser regime, though he was also a gifted cartoonist.
A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature Page 11