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14 - Epilogue
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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- Sonallah Ibrahim
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- 17 June 2016, pp 212-216
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Summary
Alexander Tvardovsky – ‘The hero of my tale, whom I love with all my heart, whom I have tried to depict in all his beauty, who was, is, and will be beautiful, is the truth.’
Tolstoy (as quoted by Sonallah Ibrahim in his Yawmiyyat al-Wahat, 2005)It is now time to draw together some of the main threads of this study, and to attempt a brief, overall summary and evaluation of Sonallah Ibrahim's novels to date. (I use the words ‘to date’ advisedly, as Sonallah Ibrahim is still writing and undoubtedly still has it in his power to surprise us – even though, realistically speaking, it may be doubted whether any future novels would be likely to radically change our overall evaluation of his work.)
We may first observe, by way of background to the forthcoming discussion, that if there is one single value that he himself regards as having dominated the whole of his literary activities, it is the devotion to ‘truth’ (‚idq), as exemplified in the quotation from Yawmiyyat al-Wahat at the head of this chapter. As Samia Mehrez observes, it was the question of ‘truth’ in relation to the writer that formed the central underlying theme of the George Antonius Lecture that he delivered in Oxford in April 2005;1 and it also figures prominently in the acceptance speech that he gave on receiving the Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought for the year 2004 in Berlin2 – a speech that stands in marked contrast to the words with which he had rejected the Egyptian State novel prize the previous year. This devotion to ‘truth’ as the artist's prime motivation has also been clearly linked in the case of Sonallah Ibrahim himself with a strong and explicit political commitment, carried through into his writing career from his early years as a member of the Egyptian Communist Party – a motivation that forms a mirror image, as it were, to the ‘negative characteristics’ that he applied in Yawmiyyat al-Wahat to his definition of the role of the writer in contemporary Egypt as follows:
Not to write something enjoyable merely for its aesthetic value. Not simply to lose oneself in philosophical and intellectual issues. Not to live captive to one's individual experience.
1 - Introduction: Background and Context
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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- Sonallah Ibrahim
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It is something of a truism to observe that the history of modern Egyptian literature, as indeed of modern Arabic literature more generally, has been intimately bound up with political and social developments in the region. General histories of modern Arabic literature traditionally began their accounts of the nah∂a, or ‘revival’, from the politically charged date of 1798, the date of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, and although more recent critics have been more nuanced in their approach, this date still (rightly) retains a prominent place in most accounts of the Arab literary and cultural revival. During the twentieth century, the 1919 Egyptian revolt against the British occupation provided inspiration for Tawfiq al-Hakim's seminal novel ʿAwdat al-Ruh (Return of the Spirit; 1933), and we can point to a subsequent series of political events that punctuated the region and whose significance is reflected in the works of Arab writers, in both poetry and prose. Of these events, the most significant are perhaps the nakba (the ‘disaster’), the 1948 conflict leading to the founding of the State of Israel, with wide-ranging repercussions through much of the Arab world; the Egyptian Free Officers’ Revolution of 1952, leading to the establishment of the Nasserist regime; and the naksa, the ‘great setback’, embodied in the humiliating defeat of the Arabs in the June (Six-Day) War of 1967, which resulted in a period described by one commentator as one of ‘anguished self-criticism, [and] a searching reappraisal of post-war Arab culture and political practice’. The 1967 War is of particular significance in the present context, for it sparked a new generation of writers, often known as the ‘Generation of the Sixties’ (Jil al-sittinat), who began to react more outspokenly than before, accusing their predecessors of contributing to the defeat by their silence, and embarking on a re-evaluation of literary forms, the role of the writer in society and the representation of reality in fiction. Many of these writers were associated with the short-lived but influential magazine, Gallery 68, published in Egypt between 1968 and 1971, which brought together a number of leading Egyptian and non-Egyptian writers, and although Sonallah Ibrahim did not form part of this group as such, commentators on this critical period frequently cite his short novel Tilka al-Ra ʾiha (first published in 1966) as a seminal work in ushering in the new mood.
Frontmatter
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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Index
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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- 17 June 2016, pp 225-231
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5 - CocaColaland: al-Lajna (1981)
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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Sonallah Ibrahim's third published novel, al-Lajna (The Committee; 1981), is regarded by many critics as his most successful work to date. In terms of length and overall conception, it has more in common with Tilka al-Ra ʾiha than with Najmat Aghustus, being constructed on a rather small scale, with little, if any, of the expansiveness of the latter work. Indeed, it arguably has more in common with Tilka al-Ra ʾiha than with any other of the author's works, both because of its comparatively short length (it covers only a little over a hundred pages of print, or some 25,000 words) and also because of certain stylistic characteristics (as well as some of the general social and political ambience) that it shares with the earlier work.
Publication and Translations
The first chapter of the novel, which describes the narrator's initial confrontation with the Committee (‘lajna’) from which the book takes its name, originally appeared as a self-contained short piece in the magazine al-Fikr al-Mu ʿasir (Contemporary Thought) in May 1979, some two years before the publication of the full work. The complete work was published in Beirut by Dar al-Kalima in 1981 and reissued in Cairo the following year (1982) by Matbuʿat al-Qahira; it has since gone through numerous editions, being reprinted or republished not only in Cairo and Beirut but also in Tunis and Marrakesh. In addition to the English translation by May St Germain and Charlene Constable, the work has been translated into French, German and a number of other European languages.
Background
As it is impossible to appreciate the thrust of Sonallah Ibrahim's satire in al-Lajna without some knowledge of the Egyptian economic and political context, it will be necessary to sketch the background to the work in some detail. Thematically, the novel represents an important new stage in the author's writing career, for the most conspicuous element is provided by the author's comments on President Anwar Sadat [al-Sādāt]’ s policy of infitāª (‘opening [up]’) – the term used to designate the ‘open-door’ economic policy of President Sadat, which, together with his policy of rapprochement with Israel, was to become one of the principal targets of political criticism not only for Sonallah Ibrahim but also for many other writers and intellectuals of his generation.
Series Editor's Foreword
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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The Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature is a new and unique series which will, it is hoped, fill in a glaring gap in scholarship in the field of modern Arabic literature. Its dedication to Arabic literature in the modern period, that is, from the nineteenth century onwards, is what makes it unique among series undertaken by academic publishers in the English-speaking world. Individual books on modern Arabic literature in general or aspects of it have been and continue to be published sporadically. Series on Islamic studies and Arab/Islamic thought and civilisation are not in short supply either in the academic world, but these are far removed from the study of Arabic literature qua literature, that is, imaginative, creative literature as we understand the term when, for instance, we speak of English literature or French literature, etc. Even series labelled ‘Arabic/Middle Eastern Literature’ make no period distinction, extending their purview from the sixth century to the present, and often including non-Arabic literatures of the region. This series aims to redress the situation by focusing on the Arabic literature and criticism of today, stretching its interest to the earliest beginnings of Arab modernity in the nineteenth century.
The need for such a dedicated series, and generally for the redoubling of scholarly endeavour in researching and introducing modern Arabic literature to the Western reader has never been stronger. The significant growth in the last decades of the translation of contemporary Arab authors from all genres, especially fiction, into English; the higher profile of Arabic literature internationally since the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988; the growing number of Arab authors living in the Western diaspora and writing both in English and Arabic; the adoption of such authors and others by mainstream, high-circulation publishers, as opposed to the academic publishers of the past; the establishment of prestigious prizes, such as the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Arabic Booker), run by the Man Booker Foundation, which brings huge publicity to the shortlist and winner every year, as well as translation contracts into English and other languages – all this and very recently the events of the Arab Spring have heightened public, let alone academic, interest in all things Arab, and not least Arabic literature.
Bibliography
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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13 - Filling a Gap: al-Jalid (2011)
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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- Sonallah Ibrahim
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- 17 June 2016, pp 205-211
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Summary
Sonallah Ibrahim's most recent full-length novel, al-Jalid (Ice), was published towards the end of January 2011, at the precise moment of the mass protests centred on Cairo's Tahrir Square that forced the resignation of the then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011 – a move that prompted the transfer of power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and everything that has followed since. According to the author's note at the end of the work, the novel had been completed in Heliopolis (Sonallah Ibrahim's home) in December 2010.
Publication and Translations
Al-Jalid was published in Cairo by Dar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida and in Beirut by Dar al-Adab in January 2011. To my knowledge, there have so far been no foreign-language translations of the work.
Background
The work, which contains an opening page reading simply ‘Moscow 1973’, clearly derives from Sonallah Ibrahim's own stay in Moscow during that same period, the circumstances of which were described in Chapter 2 above. As is the case with many of Sonallah Ibrahim's novels, few specific dates are given in the text, but there are discussions about, and occasional references to, a number of significant (mainly external) political events, enabling the reader to establish an at least approximate chronology in his or her mind; the novel closes with a New Year party, which provides a firm closing date for the work. The external events referred to include significant developments in a number of different parts of the world, including US involvement in Vietnam, and the overthrow of the Marxist Chilean President Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973; but from the viewpoint of an Egyptian spending the period in question abroad, the most significant is unsurprisingly the October 1973 Arab–Israeli War (also known as the Ramadan, or Yom Kippur, War), which began on 6 October 1973 when Egyptian and Syrian forces launched surprise attacks on Israeli positions in the occupied Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights.
8 - Prison of Dishonour: Sharaf (1997)
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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- Sonallah Ibrahim
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- 17 June 2016, pp 123-135
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Summary
Five years separate the publication date of Dhat (1992) from that of Sonallah Ibrahim's eagerly-awaited next novel, Sharaf, completed at the end of 1996 and published in 1997. The novel, which occupies some 470 pages in the Arabic edition, returns us to the prison environment of Tilka al-raʾiha with which the author had begun his novelistic career to develop a number of disparate themes encountered in his previous works, including those of corruption, hypocrisy, sexual deviancy and globalisation. At the same time, the work carries forward and further develops the novelistic techniques already noted in previous chapters, most obviously in Dhat. Although several of the themes of Dhat find an echo in Sharaf, and the protagonists of the two works are linked by their humble backgrounds, however, their situations are quite different: for unlike Dhat (whose social status and situation as an Egyptian housewife is a wholly unexceptional one) that of the protagonist of Sharaf (an Egyptian youth consigned to prison for killing a foreigner who has tried to rape him) is both extraordinary and desperate –much of the narrative, indeed, being occupied with his discussions with his lawyers in an attempt to find a way of escaping from his predicament.
Publication and Translations
The full text of Sharaf was published in Cairo in book form by the state-run Dar al-Hilal in 1997, as part of the long-established Riwayat al-Hilal literary series, which had been founded in 1949. This represented a departure from Sonallah Ibrahim's normal publishing practice. Unusually also, some material from the opening chapters had already been serialised in the Egyptian literary weekly Akhbar al-Adab, edited at the time by the equally eminent Egyptian novelist Gamal al-Ghitani, who contributed an editorial entitled ‘Sharaf sunʿ Allāh’ in which he summed up Sonallah Ibrahim's career as marked by dedication and asceticism and characterised Sharaf as
perhaps his chef d'oeuvre, where he represents a whole age towards which he feels total estrangement: an estrangement that he audaciously and astutely expresses artistically and creatively … with techniques which characterise his work alone, especially the documentary level which he transforms into pure creative energy, replete with black humour.
6 - War in Lebanon: Bayrut, Bayrut (1984)
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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- Sonallah Ibrahim
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- 17 June 2016, pp 86-103
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Summary
Sonallah Ibrahim's next novel, Bayrut, Bayrut (Beirut, Beirut), published in 1984, picks up and develops, in the context of the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–90, a number of themes and techniques that had been hinted at in his previous works. The geographical setting of the work is itself of some interest, for Egyptian writers in general have not been notable for their interest in other parts of the Arab world. Indeed, it is probably little exaggeration to say that, with the conspicuous exception of the Palestine-Israel dispute, Arab writers in general have shown a marked reluctance to interest themselves in the problems of the region outside their own particular countries. Although the Lebanese war itself provides a proportion of the material for the novel, however, this is by no means the only theme running through the work, and problems of publishing in the Arab world (a subject on which the author could bring to bear significant personal experience) clearly emerge as one of the narrator's other main preoccupations.
Publication and Translations
The novel was written during the period April 1982 to December 1983 and first published in Cairo in 1984 by the author's favourite Cairo publishing house, Dar al-Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi; it was subsequently reprinted in 1988 and on several subsequent occasions. An English translation by Chip Rossetti was published by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing in September 2014 under the title Beirut, Beirut; to my knowledge, there are no other foreign-language translations.
Background
Sonallah Ibrahim's interest in the Lebanese Civil War appears to have been initially sparked by the difficulties of publishing his work in Egypt – a situation that had plagued him since the writing of Tilka al-raʾiha, and which prompted him to visit Lebanon in 1979. Then as now, the country enjoyed a reputation as one of the most liberal publishing centres in the Arab world, but for some four years had been in the grip of a complex civil war that was to last until 1990. Finding himself in the middle of the conflict, and in an attempt to understand what was happening, the author began to research and document the events around him, and it was this research that formed the basis for his subsequent novel.
2 - Rebel with a Pen
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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- Sonallah Ibrahim
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- 17 June 2016, pp 17-33
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Summary
Sonallah Ibrahim was born in Cairo in 1937, into what appears to have been a somewhat dysfunctional family. His father, a high-ranking Egyptian civil servant, was nearly sixty when Sonallah was born – the first child of his father's considerably younger second wife, who had originally been hired as a nurse to tend to his paralysed first wife. ‘I am the son of a father from the upper-middle class’, Sonallah Ibrahim recalled a few years ago. ‘But his family looked down on me because my mother was from a poor background. She was more like a maid to my father's first wife.’
For reasons that are not entirely clear, the second wife apparently disappeared from the family scene at an early stage, a development that did little to alleviate the somewhat lonely existence that Sonallah Ibrahim appears to have suffered for most of his childhood. Details of his childhood are fairly sparse, but it is clear that his relationship with his father (who in terms of his age was more like a grandfather to him) was an important one in his formation. Sonallah Ibrahim's father had held civilian posts in the War Ministry in Egypt and the Sudan, and the writer records that, like many men of his generation, he embodied a number of contradictions: he describes him as being both ‘religious’ and ‘enlightened’, and records that from him he learned both ‘to respect many religious values’, and at the same time ‘to hate the British occupier, the King, and corrupt parties; to be ready to rebel against the prevailing conditions and ideas; and not to accept anything that was not in accord with reason’. Bored at school, where he was a mediocre student, he quickly sought refuge in the world of fantasy – conveyed to him, as to other writers of his generation, through the Riwayat al-jayb (Pocket Stories) series of publications, where he made the acquaintance of such ‘heroes’ as Arsène Lupin, Robin Hood, the Three Musketeers, and Captain Blood – many of them renowned, as the author notes, for ‘taking from the rich and giving to the poor’. He made his own first writing experiments at the age of twelve or thirteen, and also tried translating stories from English into Arabic at about the same time.
7 - Consumer Society: Dhat (1992)
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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Summary
After his brief foray into the wider Arab world in Bayrut, Bayrut, Sonallah Ibrahim's next novel, Dhat, published in 1992, returns to contemporary Egypt as the focal point of the narrative, picking up and developing a number of themes already evident in the author's earlier novels.
Publication and Translations
The novel was first published in Cairo by Dar al-Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi in 1992, and has been reprinted several times since. A French translation by Richard Jacquemond was published in 1993 as Les Années de Zeth, and an English translation by Tony Calderbank appeared in Cairo in 2001, published by the American University in Cairo Press under the title Zaat. The work was enthusiastically received and was nominated for the official novel prize due to be awarded at the Cairo International Book Fair in early 1993, but the nomination was withdrawn when it was pointed out that it would be incongruous for a state award to be awarded to a work that deliberately set out to subvert and discredit it.
Background
The political development of Egypt was arguably only briefly interrupted by the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Although still held in favour by the West, Sadat had become progressively isolated domestically, as well as in the wider Arab world, most particularly because of his policies towards Israel; and in contrast to that of Nasser, his death was generally viewed with indifference by his fellow countrymen. Khalid al-Islambuli, the leader of the Islamist plot to kill Sadat, remained unrepentant to the end, and together with a number of other conspirators, was executed in April 1982.
Despite the dramatic nature of Sadat's demise, the transfer of power to his successor, Husni Mubarak, was a smooth one. Husni Mubarak had not been a member of the original Free Officers’ Movement and, despite having served as Vice-President under Sadat since 1975, was not well known to the Egyptian public. The initial impression he gave to his fellow countrymen was, however, a favourable one – his seemingly modest nature presenting a stark contrast to that of Sadat, who had begun to suffer from a growing megalomania in the final months of his rule, as he became increasingly out of touch with the real needs of the Egyptian population.
Contents
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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10 - Widening Horizons (2): In the Land of the Capitalists: Amrikanli (Amri Kan Li) (2003)
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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- Sonallah Ibrahim
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- 17 June 2016, pp 155-170
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Summary
As had already been the case with the appearance of Warda only three years after that of Sharaf, the publication of Amrikanli in 2003 appeared to confirm two trends in Sonallah's output. The first was a reduction in the intervals between the publication dates of his major, full-length novels; the second was a continuing enthusiasm for longer works – Amrikanli, with its 480 or so pages, being a work of almost exactly the same length as Sharaf and Warda. Although the geographical setting represents a major (and at first sight, unlikely) innovation in the author's novelistic career, both the themes and the techniques of the novel clearly build on those of earlier works – though the fact that the novel is set not in the Middle East but rather in the USA, following a period of residence there, is presumably at least partly responsible for the fact that the author here takes what has seemed to me (though not necessarily to everyone) to be a slightly more measured approach to his criticism of globalisation and Western culture than in some previous works.
Publication and Translations
The full text of Amrikanli (Amri Kan Li) was first published in Cairo in 2003 by Sonallah Ibrahim's preferred publishing house, Dar al-Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, which had already published al-Lajna, Bayrut, Bayrut, Dhat and Warda. A corrected edition was issued in 2004, and a French translation by Richard Jacquemond appeared in 2005 under the title Amrikanli: Un automne à San Francisco. To the best of my knowledge, there are to date no translations into other languages.
Background
Amrikanli took about two and a half years to write. Like several of the author's previous novels, though not an autobiography, it is based at least partly, and closely, on the author's own experience – in this case, his experience as a visiting associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies of the University of California at Berkeley in 1998/9.
11 - Return to Childhood: al-Talassus (2007)
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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The appearance of al-Talassus in 2007 represented something of a shift in direction in Sonallah Ibrahim's sequence of novels. Generally regarded as one of the least political and most personal of the author's novels, it is set not in post-revolutionary Egypt, as most of its predecessors had been, but in the dying days of the Egyptian monarchy, towards the end of the 1940s – a time when Sonallah Ibrahim himself was some ten or eleven years old.
Publication and Translations
The text of al-Talassus was published in Cairo in 2003 by Dar al-Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, the house that had published the majority of the author's novels first released in Cairo, with the exception of Sharaf. An English translation by Hosam Aboul-Ela entitled Stealth (a somewhat controversial rendering of the title, for a discussion of which see below) was published in London by Aflame in 2010, but the company went bankrupt in 2012; the English translation was subsequently republished in the USA by New Directions in 2014. A French translation by Richard Jacquemond under the title Le Petit Voyeur was published by Actes Sud in 2008. To my knowledge, there are to date no translations into other languages.
Background
In terms of the author's relation to the events described, the background to al-Talassus needs little elaboration: we are clearly faced with an attempt to recreate, at both a personal and a national/societal level, a period of the past through which the author lived. The work is labelled riwāya (‘novel’) on the cover, but like many of the author's previous novels, though not an autobiography in the strict sense of the word, it is clearly closely based on the author's own experience.
The relationship between the work itself and the author's own life has been made quite explicit in interviews by the author himself, who in 2013, for example, noted that ‘Stealth is not a memoir, it is fiction based on some facts’. As an example of the way in which fact has been transformed into fiction, he explains that:
We had a servant at home, a girl. My father was treating her nicely and I was jealous. Reaching the same age as my father at the time, I understood his situation.
4 - Michelangelo and the Dam: Najmat Aghustus (1974)
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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Summary
The ‘Second-work Crisis’
After publishing Tilka al-raʾiha, Sonallah Ibrahim, by his own admission, was in something of a dilemma as to what to do next. Speaking to Youssef Rakha in 2003, he explained that:
There is such a thing as the second-work crisis, when you've made a strong debut and you don't know how to live up to it. People invariably expect something stronger. Maybe this explains the shift in focus after Tilka Al-Ra'iha … In 1967 I actually completed another novel, written in the same vein. It was never published. I was on my way to Germany and didn't have time to look for a publisher. When I looked at it again I didn't feel it was the kind of thing with which to present myself to the reader, having made an initial impression. Then I had a topic, the High Dam, which preoccupied me completely from 1967, even before 1967, I think, until 1970 …
The work in question, entitled al-Riwaya (Story), remained unpublished, but a xeroxed copy of the typescript (faded and difficult to read) survives in Oxford and was discussed by Ali Jad in his Form and Technique in the Egyptian Novel. Dated Beirut, 19 August 1968, the seventy-one- page manuscript shows the author again employing the ‘telegraphic’ prose style of Tilka al-Ra ʾiha in a first-person narrative that, like his earlier work, to a considerable extent revolves around the narrator's unsatisfactory sexual relationships – the most significant of which here takes the form of an affair with his brother's wife. Although the work gives the impression of being perhaps a trifle less self-centred than Tilka al-raʾiha, however, and the relationships are less ephemeral and more sustained, al-Riwaya nonetheless does not suggest any major development either in the author's technique or in his use of thematic material, and several scenes suggest above all a desire to shock. All in all, it is hard to resist the conclusion both that the work is little more than a ‘rerun’ of Tilka al-raʾiha, and that, in terms of the development of his literary career, Sonallah Ibrahim was right not to pursue the publication further.
Sonallah Ibrahim
- Rebel with a Pen
- Paul Starkey
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This book provides an introduction not only to the works of Sun'Allah Ibrahim, but also, more generally, to the modern literature of Egypt (and elsewhere in the Arab world) over a 40-year period, in its social, historical and political setting.
9 - Widening Horizons (1): Sex, Memory and Revolution: Warda (2000)
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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Summary
Sonallah Ibrahim's next full-length novel, Warda, published in 2000, continued the trend established in several of the author's previous works of merging a clearly fictional ‘frame’ narrative with real or fictional documents of one sort or another, a technique for which the term ‘docu-fiction’ has sometimes been used. The mixture of fact and fiction is explicitly acknowledged by the author in a statement preceding the text, which concludes that: ‘for this reason, they [i.e. the following pages] are better read as … fiction’. The work also continued a line of development established in Bayrut, Bayrut, in that it was set largely outside Egypt, though despite certain similarities with the earlier work, it represents a considerably more complex literary endeavour than Bayrut, Bayrut, both structurally and in geographical terms. Like many of the author's previous novels, the work – which is an attempt to portray and understand the so-called Dhofar rebellions of the 1960s and early 1970s – is the product of a considerable amount of original research. The subject matter may strike some as surprising, for notwithstanding Nasser's intervention in Yemen, the history of the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula during that period had not been (and, one may confidently say, is still not) a subject of major interest to most Egyptian intellectuals, let alone the general population; the choice of subject may therefore be taken as another example of the author's determination to follow his own path rather than be swayed by current trends and fashions.
Sonallah Ibrahim himself described the book as ‘an attempt to understand what happened over 30 years throughout the entire region’, and as the product of ‘five entire years [of] reading and meeting people and looking for anything, however small, about the [Omani] Êufār revolutionaries’, adding that, in attempting to recapture the events of the politically charged atmos-phere of the late 1950s and early 1960s – events through which he himself had lived – he had tried to avoid becoming nostalgic.
Preface
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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Summary
This book is designed as an introduction to the novels of Sonallah Ibrahim, widely regarded as one of Egypt's, and the Arab world's, most distinguished and distinctive contemporary writers, and a pioneer of the new mood that began to dominate the Arab cultural environment from the mid-1960s onwards. Although there are several articles and book chapters in English devoted to Sonallah Ibrahim's works, to my knowledge there is no comprehensive study of his novels as a whole in English (or in any other language, for that matter), and the present work is therefore intended to fill an important gap. It should be noted that the work does not attempt to cover Sonallah Ibrahim's other varied literary activities – which include short stories (though this is not a genre to which the author has made any significant contribution), writing for children, translations, and non-fictional writing, except where (as is the case with his prison diaries, for example) they are directly and obviously relevant to a discussion of the novels themselves.
Sonallah Ibrahim's novelistic output, which spans over forty-five years, represents a unique contribution to modern Egyptian literature, as well as to Arabic literature more generally, being almost always closely related in some way or other to the social, political or historical development either of Egypt or of some other region of the Arab world. A reading of Ibrahim's novels will therefore serve as an introduction not only to the development of Arabic literature over the last half-century or so but also to certain trends in the historical and political development of modern Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, as viewed from the author's personal perspective, which is consistently Marxist and anti-capitalist in tone.
In discussing the novels, I have tried where possible to relate the themes of the works to contemporary political or historical developments, while at the same time exploring the literary techniques – for example, the use of ‘intertextual’ devices – which run like a thread through the novels from Tilka al-raʾiha (1966) onwards, and which have been developed and refined through the author's long career. In terms of literary theory, I have deliberately kept my account ‘light’; some use has been made of the analytical framework provided by Gérard Genette when discussing the evolution of Sonallah Ibrahim's often innovative narrative techniques, but this is not the primary focus of the present study.
3 - Cairo Prison: Tilka al-raʾiha (1966)
- Paul Starkey, University of Durham
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- Book:
- Sonallah Ibrahim
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 23 September 2017
- Print publication:
- 17 June 2016, pp 34-50
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Summary
We begin our exploration of Sonallah Ibrahim's novels, then, with Tilka al-raʾiha, perhaps the best-known and arguably still the most controversial of the author's works, not only for the heated reaction that it provoked in the censor's office, but also for the controversy it aroused among the Egyptian literary establishment – the author Yahya Haqqi (1905–93), for example, a man previously known for his generally liberal views, remarking that he found one scene ‘absolutely disgusting’. The work not only marks a seminal moment in the development of contemporary Egyptian (and, more generally, Arabic) literature, but is also arguably unique among such works in that as much, if not more, discussion has probably taken place about the work's circumstances of publication as about the literary qualities of the work itself.
The Background
The political and literary background to the publication of this work (which for the purposes of the present discussion we will categorise as a novel, though ‘novella’ might be a better description) has for the most part been covered in previous chapters. The work is clearly heavily dependent on the author's own experiences of life in Cairo, both inside and outside of prison, and it reflects the stifling political atmosphere that had begun to envelop Cairo (and indeed, Egypt more generally) as the heady initial optimism of the 1952 Free Officers’ Revolution wore thin, to be replaced by a mood of disillusion bordering on despair. The situation of the work's narrator/ protagonist in turn reflects that of the author himself – the course of whose life, as an Egyptian Marxist and member of Haditu (Democratic Movement for National Liberation), had inevitably been dependent in the late 1950s and early 1960s on the vagaries of the Nasserist regime's relationship with the Egyptian Communist Party and its various factions. The attitude of these factions towards the regime was itself a fluctuating one. The communists had initially welcomed the Free Officers’ coup of 1952, but quickly broke with them following the hanging of the leaders of a strike at the Kafr al-Dawwar textile factory later that year. For his part, Nasser's own stance was dictated by a combination of internal and external factors.