by Nadia Wassef
It didn’t help that I’d met Paulo Coelho years before. In 2005, he visited Egypt and lectured at Cairo University. Photographs of him seated next to Naguib Mahfouz flooded newspapers. Diwan, as his designated bookseller, shepherded him through every venue, selling hundreds of his books along the way. Finally, near the end of his visit, I was seated next to him at a dinner. I immediately told him how much I’d enjoyed a recent lecture of his at Cairo University. He was completely uninterested, probably so accustomed to cultish reverence that my enthusiasm left no impression. He turned to the lady on his other side, and I left.
The exchange, like most exchanges with people we have only met in our minds, was disappointing. By 2014, his book had been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 315 weeks, had been translated into eighty different languages, and held the Guinness world record for the most translated book by any living author. By 2014, I had been stocking and stacking the shelves of Diwan’s ten stores for over a decade. I was getting worn out. I sent a memo to the buying department banning The Alchemist, and all other Paulo Coelho titles, from our display tables, unless they were newly released. I was tired of walking into Diwans, only to be greeted by Veronika deciding to die, or Eleven Minutes, or The Witch of Portobello. I worried my buyers were getting lazy. They were supposed to support and uphold Diwan’s mission of surprising and delighting our customers with new books. Paulo’s books began to symbolize the path of least resistance: they pledged certainty to a world of uncertainty.
* * *
“What the hell is he doing over there?”
“Don’t raise your voice; we’re in a bookstore,” Dalia hissed, her hands up in a pacifying gesture. Dalia, Diwan’s head buyer, had been mentored and trained by the formidable Nehaya, and it showed.
“I’ll calm down if you explain this abomination.” I stared her down. We were in the new Maadi store, located on Road 254. We’d opened it in 2013, a few years after closing our original Maadi location, which had failed miserably. During our expansion phase, we’d made big mistakes: we opened shops in locations that weren’t ideal, then closed them too early, or kept them open too long. Both outcomes added to the losses on our balance sheet. We wrote them off generously and overrated the benefits of the lessons they taught. As with our successes, Hind, Nihal, and I divided our disasters equally among ourselves. We cared too much about one another’s feelings to hurt them. I knew serious businessmen wouldn’t have taken the same care. But we weren’t serious, and we weren’t men.
“Is this about your memo? This is a new title, so it can be displayed on main tables according to your rule.”
“Five months old hardly qualifies as ‘new’ in our industry.”
As we kept arguing, I was reminded of just how much control I’d ceded over the years to Dalia and her team of buyers. I’d given up what I loved the most. Dalia had worked at Diwan for a decade, risen through the ranks, and now held one of the most critical jobs in the administration. I knew she was more adept with numbers and spreadsheets than I, but I still insisted on looking over her shoulder at every turn, checking the numbers of her copious reports.
“I think you should showcase more original authors,” I urged.
“More than I already do?” Dalia shuffled through yet another report. “Let’s see. Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies has only sold ten copies of the fifty I ordered over the last nine months.”
“Maybe because you gambled on the hardback. You know this isn’t a hardback market,” I interjected unhelpfully.
“You can’t give us budgets and targets, then keep us from achieving them.”
“Put them on the central display table and brief customer-service staff to recommend them.” At this point, I was pleading.
“Nehaya taught me that every title pays rent to sit on my shelf. If it doesn’t pay, it gets evicted,” Dalia retorted, as we were joined by Sayed, her assistant. His gaze shifted between Dalia and me. He clearly had no interest in adjudicating on a disagreement between his boss and her boss. She continued, “Just because it won the Man Booker doesn’t mean our readers care.”
“Bookselling is like marriage and football. While a fair amount of skill is needed, it’s more about fate, and luck, than we’d like to admit.” I paused, then offered a bargain. “I’ll give you Paulo, if you give me Hilary, right next to him.”
“Deal. They get one month, and then they’re both off the table.” Dalia nodded to Sayed, who noted our concessions to each other in his notebook with the quiet demeanor of a scribe.
Self-help books tend to mirror the ailments of the eras in which they are written. After the 2008 crash and subsequent depression, books of financial guidance proliferated. In the consumerism and abundance that followed, the decluttering guru Marie Kondo flourished. Despite my resentment of the popular self-help genre, I believe books do help us. In the decade before the Egyptian revolution, self-help sales soared. Whether due to correlation or causation, these unprecedented sales felt related to the genre’s promise of agency and problem-solving. Egyptians, tired of waiting for the government to help them, looked for arenas where they could help themselves. It was better than doing nothing.
* * *
Over Diwan’s first decade, customers browsing the Arabic section of our stores bought pragmatic how-to books to better their skills as vibrant members of the labor force. These books upheld the belief that our lives can improve if we work harder. The Arabic translation of Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People sold remarkably well. I wondered if Diwan’s readers shared my ambivalence toward these Western business books, which so clearly targeted an audience that didn’t include us.
I’d given up entirely on reading them. Instead, following Nihal’s recommendation, I read about positive thinking. I tried to manifest, to visualize, to focus. At the end of every quarter, I willed the next quarter to be better. But it never was, no matter what we did. Our cycles of success, failure, profit, and loss were difficult to break. As we sank further into the red, Hind, Nihal, and I discussed pathways that could take us back into the black. Nihal said we had to close more stores. Hind believed we had to keep on going till we made ends meet. I didn’t know what to think. I was tired. My dream was distant and unmanageable. Diwan felt like an albatross hanging around my neck. I worried that Diwan was retaliating against us for wanting too much and taking too much. But we kept each other afloat. Some days, Nihal felt it was hopeless; other days I did. Hind reminded us that all was transient.
Just as we’d expanded, we began to aggressively contract. We closed stores and laid off staff. We paid out penalties and granted early-termination packages. The first store to go was Mohandiseen. I wasn’t too attached to it, so it didn’t sting, unlike Cairo University. That was the failure that I couldn’t call anything else. I still wished I could have reenvisioned the space differently, like making it just a café with some affordable stationery items. My tunnel vision had kept me from seeing what was. Next were the smaller locations, like the kids’ Diwan inside the Gezira Sporting Club (encouraged by the growing number of potential bookstores, they had decided to double the rent), then the mall stands. The Cairo Airport Diwan had languished under bureaucracy. Government rules and regulations had kept us from doing our jobs. We were allowed to deliver our merchandise to their warehouses, but we were not permitted to restock in the store. Instead, we had to trust duty-free staff who did nothing without constant harassment and cajoling.
* * *
Finally, we made a plan: we would simplify our existing stores. We couldn’t rebuild our vision for every neighborhood or every new customer base. We had to make a formula and trust it. But if one thing disrupts a tidy business plan, it’s massive political tumult. Like a car crash, it happened both instantly and in slow motion. On January 25, 2011, Egyptians filled public squares. Their frustration at every unfulfilled promise made over the previous five decades was palpable. During the early days, before we could call it a revolution, there was a series of e
scalating protests that police responded to with rubber bullets and tear gas. I called my mother.
“Mum, it’s not safe for you to stay alone. Move in with us, at least until we see how this will turn out.”
“My darling, you remind me of your father. Always worrying. I’m relieved he is no longer with us. He’d be having a fit with all this uncertainty, and I’d have to listen to him rant.”
“Mum, you shouldn’t be alone.”
“I’m not alone, and neither is Egypt. Masr Mahrousa. Egypt is blessed. It always has been, and it always will be. Everything is as it should be. It will all work out in the end.”
“Mum, look out of your fucking window. Do you not see the tear gas?”
“Your problem is that you rely too much on what you see.”
Revolutions are cataclysmic. Emotions run high. Discontent and hope flourish side by side. Ancient fault lines break open. Nothing is tidy. Nothing is clear. As an Egyptian observing the events of 2011, I felt tentatively optimistic. As a business owner, I dreaded the cost of anarchy. Unless you are a volatility index in the stock market, instability doesn’t make you money. And the months of instability that followed were emotionally and financially destructive. Marches and protests erupted in every city. We tried to keep staff morale and physical stores intact. For our remaining seven stores and 108 staff members, the protests, curfews, and blocked roads added to the uncertainty. Every day, we lost revenue. Stores couldn’t open. People were buying food, not books. Aware of our social responsibilities, and regardless of cash flow and battered balance sheets, we continued to pay full salaries while many other businesses deferred or withheld payment.
Like an agnostic praying to God in times of need, I found myself wishing that there were a self-help book to guide me through what I was feeling. Under Mubarak’s reign, Egypt had been riddled with injustice. But we were accustomed to that injustice. Now, we feared the unknown. As unrest continued, protests became millioniyat, million-man marches. Tahrir Square was the focal point. I knew the area well. I’d walked through it daily as a university student. I’d rescued The Naked Chef from the nearby Mogamma’.
So many others were spending their days and nights in the square. Forming a utopian microcosm. Helping others. Dreaming of a different country. I’d dreamed of a different country in the 1990s, protesting against female genital mutilation. This time, I didn’t protest. I didn’t go to Tahrir Square because none of the factions seemed to represent my hopes for Egypt. I wasn’t sure what anyone stood for.
And I had a business to run. Even though we weren’t making profits, we were still a third place. Our shop floors became confessionals. People gathered, spoke, and compared experiences. Diwan was a place to escape from, or return to, the political moment. I asked myself difficult questions. What was Diwan’s role in all of this? How would we adapt to survive? There was one question I couldn’t even ask myself: Would Diwan survive at all?
* * *
After eighteen days and nights of protests, President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, bringing his thirty-year reign to an end. There was euphoria at the bright future that lay ahead. By 2012, following a year of transitional governments, political naïveté (we should have read The Prince more closely), and chaos, we found ourselves between a rock and a hard place. We were finally back at the ballot boxes, forced to choose between two familiar candidates: a Muslim Brotherhood candidate and an ex–army general. Like the spinning earth, we were back where we started.
On June 30, 2012, almost a year and a half after the first protests, Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, was sworn in as Egypt’s first democratically elected president. Morsi would be a president to some Egyptians, but not all. Not me. My staff and I were divided. They sympathized with the Brotherhood for practical if not religious reasons. Most had grown up in areas where Brotherhood community organizations offered education and medical services that far surpassed the meager government offerings. I resented past governments for having delivered their people to Islamists by failing to meet their most basic needs.
In another context, I would have sucked it up and endured. One or two terms and he’s gone. Unfortunately, that’s not how Egypt’s rulers operate. They abdicate only under pressure from the hand of God or the boot of man. I dreaded decades of Islamic rule for Egypt. I knew I couldn’t change the inevitable. Once again, I could control only myself. I planned my exodus. When, a year later, Morsi and his cabal were ousted by popular revolt and army boots, my plans had already begun. I heard the banter in our office corridors, Muslim staff “joking” with their Coptic colleagues that they hoped they would be spared the jizya, a tax historically paid by non-Muslims to their Muslim rulers. I wasn’t laughing. I had to choose between Diwan’s future and my children’s, and I chose the latter. Diwan had already claimed the last fifteen years.
Our customers were reading more than ever. While sales of my English books fell—buying them seemed almost unpatriotic—Hind’s Arabic sales mushroomed. The early revolution years produced infinite material for sarcasm, satire, and absurdism, all of which flourished in the newfound disorder and freedom from censorship. Talk shows rode the wave. Everyone had an opinion and insisted on voicing it. So everyone talked and nobody listened. As quickly as the tornado of overexpression swept through Egypt, it consumed itself, spinning out into nothing.
Around 2014, buying patterns shifted as collective fatigue set in, eventually giving way to disillusionment. There was a notably increased demand for spiritual titles. I felt the pain of our disappointment. Books, especially books about transcendence, were antidotes to burnout. We’d been watching the news too much in the fevered years following the revolution. There was a sense of impending failure. The Arab Spring had unspooled into the endless winter of our discontent. Suddenly, everyone seemed to be buying the 2008 translation of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, a book about manifesting one’s desires through the power of thought. After my tryst with Paulo, and at Nihal’s behest, I picked it up, read the first few pages, and instinctively understood what it promised. The Bible made a similar vow, in the Gospel of Luke, “for everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks the door will be opened.” The Alchemist and The Secret spoke to a quintessentially human habit: dreaming. We wanted to make our dreams real. But what happens after that? When your dream comes true, outgrowing what you’ve imagined, what then? There’s the problem of classification. A dream cannot materialize, or it no longer is itself. Maybe the entelechy of dreams could be called loss.
We wanted to remake ourselves. We wanted to remodel our country. We wanted to know one another. We kept the faith, despite the odds. We refused to be bitter. Reading itself is an expression of faith, if not the ultimate act of self-help.
* * *
“I have a present for you,” I said to Nihal, as I placed a copy of Paul Arden’s It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be between her hands.
“I thought you hated self-help books.” Nihal’s eyes sparkled with surprise.
“I wouldn’t go so far as hate. Besides, it’s not a self-help book. It’s from Art and Design. It’s by an advertising guru … charlatans who know they are charlatans. My kind of people.” I knew Nihal would need convincing. I took back the book and began flipping through its pages, reading aloud. “‘Your vision of where or who you want to be is the greatest asset you have.’ Fucking brilliant. ‘Without having a goal it is difficult to score.’ Fucking genius. ‘The perosn’—intentionally misspelled—‘who doesn’t make mistakes is unlikely to make anything.’ Fucking true. We are living proof. And my fucking favorite: ‘Fail. Fail again. Fail better.’” I could tell she was sold. I handed the book back.
That last line was excerpted from my favorite pessimist, Samuel Beckett. I lived by his words. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The line has a strange life of its own, appearing tattooed on the arm of a famous tennis player and in the online bios of multiple Silicon Vall
ey techies. In case you’re wondering, it applies to everything, the best and the worst in this life: love, marriage, business, friendship, revolutions, and even hope.
EPILOGUE
When I left Cairo, feeling broken and beaten, I kept returning to the days when Diwan was simpler. When Hind, Nihal, and I were all positive forces in each other’s lives. When I wasn’t crippled by guilt for abandoning everyone and everything I held dear. I felt like a fraud whenever anyone congratulated me on what we’d built. Money may not be the most important measure of success, but in business it is. The truth is that Diwan isn’t a business. She’s a person, and this is her story.
If I had the chance to do it all again, I would never prioritize income over impact. I would choose a bookstore that made a mark over a bookstore that made a profit. We had to make mistakes in order to learn from them. We had to pay a steep price for doing what hadn’t been done before. Maybe we should’ve been satisfied with just one shop. But Zamalek was always too small for all of us.
The first five years were chaos. Somehow, things went according to the plan we hadn’t even made. The next five years deviated wildly from the plans we did make. And the five years after that were just painful. Nihal, depleted, went on leave from Diwan. Hind and I followed. But we couldn’t leave Diwan with no one. We tried to appease her. We created a five-person management team from the different divisions. It didn’t go well. We hired a CEO. It went less well.