FICTION’S HISTORIES: WRITERS AND READERS IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Marilyn Booth
STANDING IN Muhammad Mahmoud Street, near Cairo’s Tahrir Square, one year after the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak, I watched political banners waving in the light breeze. Satirical puppets of old-regime personalities were greeted with amusement by passers-by. Commemorative T-shirt hawkers, school-children, soapbox orators and their audiences, police vans and bicycles, all sought their place, not only at Tahrir but throughout the downtown. As I wandered around before settling down in the library for my research on nineteenth-century Egyptian literature, I absorbed a kaleidoscope of images.
Along one side of Muhammad Mahmoud Street, just off the square, the high outside wall of the American University in Cairo’s old campus had become a vivid, ever-changing, visual palimpsest, an emotionally charged commentary on the Egyptian people’s resistance to authoritarianism over months – and years – of speaking truth to power with their bodies and voices. Artists young and old painted and scratched their visions on to the rough wall in a twenty-first-century equivalent to the eloquence of ancient rock paintings. Likenesses of the young martyrs of the revolution, with birth and death dates and loving tributes, seemed startling rebirths of the beautifully vital Coptic death-mask images of many centuries ago.
Another form of artistic tribute was a contemporary rendering of iconic figures from Egypt’s pharaonic eras, so widely familiar from tomb paintings and temple carvings. Revolution-inspired artists painted Egyptian goddesses and pharaohs to challenge imperial authoritarian rule. ‘Pharaoh’ as an image of political power has a very long artistic history in Egypt. If it’s an image that sparks pride, it can also gesture to ethically bankrupt authoritarian rule. One hundred and more years ago, Egyptian poets embraced the image to attack and to satirise the pretences and the very presence of British imperialist officials with their rhetoric of ‘benign’ colonial tutelage. The image has powerful critical purchase partly because ‘pharaoh’ appears in the Qur’an as an image of cruel and arrogant worldly power.
But it was the images of the ancient Egyptian goddess Nout that transfixed me. Nout is the life-giver who births the sun every morning and takes it once again into her body in the evening for safekeeping. She appears in many a pharaoh’s or high official’s tomb, watching over the mummy that was meant to repose there for ever. Today, Egypt’s artists take icons that in ancient times supported a regime of top-down power, such as Nout, and transform them into symbols for vernacular democratic practices: Nout’s sun shines down on all. A mythic history of the nation was recreated to make a new narrative, as Egyptians were striving to produce a new, just, ethically strong form of governance, not only through the state but also in institutions of social and civic life and the family, a revolutionary vision that will demand years of hard work to realise.
Throughout most of my thirty years’ acquaintance with Egypt (as a student, a researcher and a sometime resident) I could have only imagined such sights occurring in fiction. This can’t be happening here! But what I term ‘fiction’s histories’ offer another insight: much of the fiction produced in Arabic over the past century suggests convincingly how ready Egyptians, and others, were for what seemed in 2011 to promise a systemic upheaval.
Indeed, the art that had taken over walls throughout central Cairo has much in common with Arabic fiction, today and in the past. Challenging ‘top-down’ history-writing is as central to literature as it is to visual art, post-2011 but also long before. Our series of conversations at the Edinburgh International Book Festival sought to think through the attempted unmaking or ‘unravelling’ of a century-old order in the Middle East. As much as we see the signs of that on the walls of Cairo, we must also remember the persistence of seemingly intractable, yet never completely impervious, obstacles to people’s freedom to make themselves. That’s evident in Arabic fiction from the 1890s to our own time. There seems no guarantee that a ‘new order’ (for better or for worse) is on the way. But fiction, in the company of the other arts, offers pathways to interrogate the persistence of old orders (such as patriarchal thinking and authoritarian structures). Reading today’s fiction against the backdrop of Arabic novels written a hundred years ago is one of many ways to enrich our field of vision.
It seems no accident that in recent years the historical novel has featured prominently among Arabic fiction titles, just as it did in the late nineteenth century, early in the Arabic novel’s history. Revisiting major political events or tracing a family’s or a community’s more intimate paths, which might intersect with or depart from the official historical narratives of the nation, historical fiction (like recreations of ancient Egyptian myth-figures) can pose a critical, alternative history of communities. It can ask, or redefine, who the subjects of history are or should be: perhaps they’re not ‘national subjects’ but something else, or both. Selma Dabbagh’s fictional Gaza, the setting for her novel Out of It (2011), is about a place and a community and its history or histories. It’s also about diaspora as loss and community both, a situation that hovers over all Palestinian histories, as the nicely ambiguous meaning of Dabbagh’s title suggests.
What is a fiction writer’s responsibility to history? And how does she come to inhabit the spaces – physical, mental, imaginary – that allow her to respond to the ways history may be suppressed or narrowed or misrepresented by politicians or media discourse with historical narratives of her own making, based on imagining other lives?
Preparing for and then chairing the session at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on ‘Living and Writing in the Middle East’, I was struck by how the discussion we had – Mai al-Nakib, Selma Dabbagh, myself and our audience – kept on returning to history, or histories. In different ways, Mai and Selma both talked about losing the ‘historical cosmopolitanism’ (in Mai’s words) of their nations’ pasts, and how memory and collective narratives of earlier times may be lost in agendas for the present.
Now as always, at a time of ongoing crisis, retrieving – and rethinking – the narratives of history and myth, as conflictual or fanciful as these narratives may be, could be persuasive political acts. They could encourage readers to think about a future that honours many voices from the past. Dabbagh highlights fiction’s ability to reanimate these narratives. A character in Out of It finds his meaning as a political person in rewriting the archival and oral histories of Palestine: history is a character who insists on answers. Al-Nakib’s stories write history partly through objects we take with us when we go places, the meanings those objects have for us, the personal histories of connection and alienation they evoke.
As a translator and scholar, I have been so drawn to novels that are historical, not always in obvious ways. Sometimes history is front and centre, as, for example, in the great activist, scholar and writer Latifa al-Zayyat’s classic novel of coming-of-age feminism, The Open Door (1960), set in an earlier revolutionary period, the 1940s–50s, in Egypt’s national history.1 But national revolution is also – as al-Zayyat’s young characters insist – about revolution in the family, about young women’s and young men’s right to choose their futures. The theme wasn’t new in 1952, or in novels by women, but it was a liberatory moment that was celebrated, tested and criticised in fiction.
At other times history can creep in at the edges. Even when they aren’t ‘historical novels’ in the classic sense, novels (and short stories) in the Arab world today (and in diaspora, and whether written in Arabic or in many other languages Arabs speak) are grappling with questions of history. A novel I translated recently from the Arabic, Lebanese author Hassan Daoud’s The Penguin’s Song, traces displacements that Beirut’s downtown populace suffered during Lebanon’s civil war (1975–90) and in its inconclusive aftermath.2 In an isolated block of flats overlooking the old downtown, where he lived as a boy, the young-adult narrator returns obsessively to his dark shelf of old books that now mostly gather dust. Receptacles of the past, those books are where imagined lives reside, and he wonders, a bit wistfully, whether reading the same old texts could give a reader new meanings. (He thinks they can, but he doesn’t open them much.) This young, disabled man brings paltry income home to his parents from proofreading, but we never learn the content of the pages he peruses for a scruffy, stingy little publishing operation stuffed into the stifling top floor of a crowded high-rise in the rebuilt city. These pages might as well be blank. They hold none of the promise of the old volumes that he cherishes (even if he rarely rereads them). The Penguin’s Song invites readers to think about how states and political elites, as they banish people to the social and physical margins of their society, and dispossess them, destroying the old urban landscape to rebuild it for their own commercial interests, also destroy community histories. They leave young people culturally rootless, when they are already, and perhaps more than ever in recent times, socially and economically vulnerable.
How and why novelists rewrite history is a question that’s led me to dwell not only in novels on the past but in the past of novels. As a scholar drawn to the Arab nineteenth century and a translator who lives, reads and translates in and of the twenty-first century, I’m struck by the continuities in themes, as well as the differences in the ways those themes are enacted in fiction. In the decades before the First World War, the Arabic novel was a new genre drawing vigorously on popular Arabic oral storytelling and its written manifestations, and equally though controversially on European traditions of realism, romance and the Gothic. It emerged and became popular in another long moment of political crisis and possibility, when well-educated reformists, some of whom (the men!) had studied in Europe, were simultaneously excited and critical about what they saw there. In both historical novels and fictions set in their own time and place, writers took up issues of personal political liberation and freedom of choice under the many and particular stresses of the time. There was political domination under European ‘tutelage’, financial hardship as the Middle East was drawn more intensively into a European- and North American-centred capitalist economy, and social stress as new ways of thinking about personal – individual, family – life clashed with a firmly ensconced patriarchal family structure. Increasing educational opportunity (for some) meant that young people were asking questions in the 1890s as they do now. Arab women and men wrote fiction that explored tensions between self-making and the expectations or strictures that young women and men faced (and how those expectations differed according to whether one was female or male). Some fictions made explicit links between political tyranny and an implacable patriarchal ‘right’ to determine young people’s futures. Novels by women highlighted the psychic, physical and social costs to young women of coerced marriage (also a theme in novels by men). The young woman who could read and write was the heroine who could – though not always – prevail. Given persistent stereotypes of Arab women – which like all stereotypes have a toehold in reality but are never all, or even most, of the reality – it may come as a surprise to readers now that turn-ofthe-twentieth-century Arab women were publishing novels (and advancing decidedly feminist ideas). They were. Fictions like Zaynab Fawwaz’s Good Consequences, or the Radiant Maiden of al-Zahira (1899),3 Labiba Hashim’s Man’s Heart (1904), Adele Jaridini’s The Young Eastern Woman (1909) or Afifa Karam’s Fatima the Bedouin (c. 1910)4 highlighted for Arabic-reading audiences the resourcefulness, outspokenness, professional aspirations and personal desires of young (and not always elite) Arab women. Some were fiercely didactic conduct-novels, earnest attempts to shape the behaviour and the expectations of young readers.
Like elsewhere in the world a vociferous debate in the Arab press over the possibly ‘dangerous’ impact of novel-reading on the impressionable young – particularly the female young – accompanied the exuberant production of novels (many of them adaptations from French or English works). It’s true that the young heroines in these novels read – and wrote – love letters, and so maybe the parents of young readers did have reasons to worry about fiction’s influence! Perhaps the more disturbing insight was that romance was political. It was all about the many levels of liberation that individuals would seek and fight for. Good governance, these novels suggest, required respectful family relations, traced especially between parents and daughters, and husbands and wives. Zaynab Fawwaz’s Good Consequences plotted a political succession struggle, casting it as contingent on a young woman’s personal struggle to be allowed to choose her (marital) future. Fari’a and Shakib fall in love over an intellectual and poetic conversation; his respect for Fari’a’s choices validates his legitimacy as a future ruler. His rival is portrayed as an unacceptable ruler because of his lack of respect for Fari’a – he has his thugs abduct her repeatedly. Published in 1899, the novel reworked 1850s–1860s south Lebanese history in a way that insisted on a different historical narrative, one that brought women’s and other marginalised subjects’ voices into decisions on who would rule the community. The concerns are not so dissimilar to those that animated young activists in 2011 and since.
I raise this historical example because I think it is worth keeping in mind how persistent some issues are, and how youthful energies (found in humans of all ages!) continue to confront these issues. Today’s literary, artistic and political activists operate in different circumstances, but the nineteenth century (like Nout) is always with us, wherever in the world we live. With all the differences acknowledged, the conflicts, stresses and inequalities that marked the world then still mark it today. It is as well also to remember the horizontal similarities across different societies – to not exceptionalise, while always remaining deeply aware of the inequalities wrought and deepened by imperialism and settler colonialism. In the 1890s, young readers in Mansura, Egypt, were immersed in romance plots little different from those capturing young readers in Manchester in England, or Lyons in France, or Hyderabad in imperial-era India. Challenges to patriarchal governance systems in family and society are not as far apart as we tend to assume. (Reading women in Egypt were well aware of suffragists’ activism in Britain, and some supported them.) As today, ‘globalisation’ then had its liberatory and its repressive facets, and its uneven effects on class-differentiated and geographically dispersed populations.
In Afifa Karam’s Fatima the Bedouin – a novel published in the twentieth century’s first decade in Arabic in New York City – the eponymous heroine, an emigrant originally from a semi-nomadic Sunni Muslim tribe in the Lebanon, is abandoned by her lover, an elite urbanite of a Christian sect who deceived her into believing they were married before fleeing Lebanon and his parents’ wrath. With her baby in her arms, wandering dazed along Broadway (yes, Broadway, where the novel begins), Fatima is accosted as a vagrant by an officer of the NYPD. She is rescued by Alice, a wealthy New York socialite and charity patron, who – we learn through their conversations – has known parallel sufferings, though within her privileged life. This fictional encounter sounds (and is) improbable, but it’s a reminder that imagined lives in the past also helped writers and readers make sense of a world of bewildering journeys, aspirations dashed by oppressive mental and material structures, and, in spite of it all, affirming solidarities – the ‘ethics of otherness’ that al-Nakib sees as central to her own writing. Practices and desires that fiction writers scripted then, in part by writing fictional histories of their own ‘earlier times’, are ones we still grapple with now. Young people in Gaza, Kuwait and Lebanon – as well as New York, Mumbai and so many other places – experience them, engrave them on walls and read and write them in novels.
Burdened by histories that leave them few choices, histories their elders but not they themselves have helped to shape, fictional youth in Selma and Mai’s writing could, given other circumstances, be in the maidans of Cairo, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Istanbul, New York.
Of course places are not interchangeable, and fiction’s capacity to evoke the particular geographical and built layers of community experience can help to sustain survival through archiving, or recreating, memory: Palestine and Syria today are powerful examples. The fragrance of a bulldozed orchard, the cracks in those front steps that used to be ours, that conversation the night before your brother was dragged to prison, the ball game in the street … all the everyday lives that people everywhere work so hard to maintain and sometimes to overcome are the stuff of fiction. With the destruction of societies (some built with great suffering and dedication on the debris of earlier wars), the recording, evoking, constructing, of memories, of imagined and recalled oral histories, of that specific café on the corner and the precise taste of Grandma’s soup, become part of political responsibility – the bearing of witness that our writers are so conscious of doing.
Selma built her ‘fictional Gaza’ – her sense of (this) place – from the memories of others, the archives of the internet, conversations and her own emplacements elsewhere – that café, but somewhere else. Selma’s Gaza raises the compelling if unanswerable question of who the outsider or the insider is. Mai’s Kuwait, which she feels has been ‘rewritten’ by new representations that she does not recognise from her childhood – a monochromatic narrative, as she sees it, of a more polychromatic, cosmopolitan place – leads us to wonder what is ‘outside’ or ‘inside’. Time itself might make us outsiders in or to places where we think we still dwell. At the same time, the capacity we have, in our technology-driven era, to peer inside so many windows may mean more apparent access, but with it comes more responsibility: to listen, and observe, and read, humbly and widely, always conscious of our own places, the spaces – mental, physical, linguistic, political – in which we think and speak as learners, translators, writers.
The revolutionary imaginary that has emerged in so many parts of the world may be ephemeral in terms of concrete accomplishments, but it has brought youth to the forefront, a symbol of change to be sure, but also transformation’s motor. That so many new writers are engaging in today’s Arabic literary scene (including its blogosphere) is also a sign of this. Yet as we celebrate youthful energy, we must remember that so very many young people in the world do not have the means to be part of a motor of change, even when they have grown up in relatively comfortable circumstances. Even more when they have not: malnutrition, lack of educational opportunity or pressure to stay away from school, war as daily reality and various kinds and remnants of political violence and colonial rule, disease, sexual violence and domestic abuse – these are the unconscionable inequalities of the global system in a time when human inventiveness has more scope than ever to think of solutions. These, too, are the conditions necessary for liberatory thinking and art, along with the irrepressible affective energies of adolescents everywhere. Writing fiction, writing history, Arab authors keep readers mindful of persistent patterns but also alert us to their unravelling. And they remind us that it doesn’t have to be this way.