source
Al-Ahram Weekly
By
Youssef Rahkha
"The
real question is whether they have compromised themselves," says
Bahaa Taher of his generation of writers, "in order to get
recognition from the establishment..."
Active in
the left-wing and avant-garde literary circles of the 1960s (and later
one of the most widely read contemporary novelists in the Arab world),
the 63-year-old author has now received the state's Award of Merit in
Literature, the highest honour the establishment can confer on a writer.
With numerous other prizes and one novel turned into a popular
television series, the community seems to be intent on lionizing this
angry young man of Egyptian letters, more than 30 years after his career
took off. True to form, Taher shrugs off all talk of the effects of this
recognition on his latest collection of stories, Zahabtu ila Shallal (I
Went to a Waterfall), the first book to be written after his return to
Egypt from an extended stay in the West. "If the establishment is
beginning to acknowledge the 1960s generation of writers [who, up until
the early 1990s, were generally tagged as political and social
dissidents], this only goes to show that the gap separating genuine and
official culture is narrowing."
The
stories in Zahabtu ila Shallal are far from being complacent variations
on favourite themes. For Taher they comprise the effort to come to grips
with the changes wrought on the social and political landscape during 14
years of "self-imposed exile", as he puts it. "Even for
someone who has not left Egypt for a moment, it requires a terrible
effort of mind to understand how social and political developments have
affected individual lives, how they manifest in particular people. It is
this that interests me most of all. When I went to the West, you know, I
had travelled many, many times. I had been there before. But I do not
claim to have understood the West until I had lived there over a number
of years. Only then was I able to have that kind of knowledge of people,
to understand the social relations that bound them, to get closer to the
meaning of what I had merely apprehended from afar."
Here too
Taher's trick of throwing oblique, poetically elusive glances at
individuals in society holds good. One story recounts the homecoming of
an expatriate who, traumatized by the selfishness and corruption he
encounters on arriving in Sadat's Cairo, finds solace when an eccentric
taxi-driver agrees to take him from the airport without fussing over the
money. While the driver speaks of his alienation from this harshly
materialistic world, the nameless narrator recalls his own troubles,
drawing closer and closer to the event of Nasser's death, which
coincides with the circumstances that lead to his departure. As they
pass the mosque in which Nasser is buried, the driver starts divulging
his belief that Nasser was a saint with supernatural powers. Two months
before he died, he says, "he sat next to me in this taxi and wanted
to go to the Sayeda Zeinab Mosque. I told him the gate would be shut so
late at night. He said, 'Just take me there'... I saw the gate opening
for him and a powerful light coming from within. Then he went in and the
gate shut behind him. He must have known he was going and thought, I'd
better say good-bye to the Sayeda..." The driver and expatriate
lament their separate losses, but the identification of two very
different experiences of the same event is complete.
"I
would be lying if I claimed that I can grasp all that has changed in
society," Taher continues as he slowly lights a cigarette. "A
writer cannot simply look around and come up with the answers. A writer
is not a sociologist or economist whose fieldwork yields clearly
definable results. You need to know people and live among them, to know
them well across generations and classes. To me writing is this process
of exploration. In the three years since I came back, I have been
exploring the new landscape. Not only me but everyone else, those who
belong with my generation and other writers alike. We are exploring,
looking for keys to the change that has occurred." He stops to look
for an ashtray, as if to give himself time to evaluate the change.
"Because the last 15 to 20 years have witnessed a phenomenal, a
flagrant change ? to the extent that for someone like myself, who has
been absent for a long time, it is as if you come back to a totally new
country, radically different from the one you left."
Ironically
that "new country", unlike the one Taher left in the early
1980s, is eager to embrace the formerly marginal culture to which his
writing belongs. It is an odd, belated reunion. With one recusant after
another receiving the official stamp of approval, including such
vehemently anti-establishment figures as the late Amal Donqol, one has
the feeling that the insurgent energy of the 1960s has been absorbed
into the fabric of life and that right-wing authority no longer needs to
fear the "genuine culture" which it had been adamant on
suppressing. "In the past we were marginalised because we were not
blindly supportive [of established authority], nor writers of
panegyrics. And we are not so now. If the establishment acknowledges our
contribution that can only be a positive sign. It signals a kind of
development in the perception of the role of literature in society: that
writers are no longer expected to blow the government's trumpet."
But if the
recognition increasingly bestowed on the 1960s generation of writers is
"a development in the perception of the role of literature",
are we moving along the lines of western democracy? With this the
conversation takes a distinctly political turn. Taher retorts, "In
the West writers have no more freedom than they do in the East. I mean,
in most cases you cannot radically oppose certain well-established
concepts. You can speak about sex and religion as much as you like, your
freedom of expression remains intact. Of course it is also possible to
express your political views, but only within a predefined framework. In
the West you have the freedom to say what you like about God, but if you
happen to come up against the interests of the banks, or the huge
conglomerates and multinationals, not a word will be published. Unless
you function exclusively in marginal and out-of-the-way circles, you are
not permitted to say that the Arabs are right in the Arab-Israeli
conflict, you are not permitted to sympathize with the Iraqis. During
the Cold War, you were not permitted to side with the Marxists against
America... What kind of freedom is this? The freedom available to
writers under Western democracy is a theoretical freedom. Genuine
freedom is the ability to oppose the most fundamental precepts in a
given society and not risk being excluded from the mainstream. Over
here, on the other hand, I can fundamentally oppose the establishment
without losing too much..."
Notwithstanding
Taher's reservations about western democracy (which might explain the
positive tone in which he speaks of the establishment in Egypt), it is
the feeling of alienation from current Egyptian realities that explains
why some of the new stories revert back to his experience in
Switzerland. Before coming back for good, Taher had already explored
what it could mean for an Egyptian to live in the West in his widely
acclaimed last novel, Al-Hob fi al-Manfa (Love in Exile), which has been
described by I'tidal Osman as "an expansive vision that encompasses
world and homeland, north and south, self and other". In sharp
contrast, his first collection of stories, Al Khotouba (The Engagement)
had invoked, according to Sabri Hafez, "an extremely strange,
nightmarish world, which is nevertheless presented in very ordinary
language, as if its strangeness were neither surprising nor
lamentable". In Zahabtu ila Shallal, perhaps to an even greater
extent than in Al-Hob fi al-Manfa, the poetry is more intense, the world
more humane. The drama, which had been absent from Taher's early
writing, is dense with life. Was the experience of Europe necessary to
the 1990s' lyrical insurrection?
Taher
himself believes that the success of Al-Hob fi al-Manfa depended on its
drawing on an emotionally compelling episode in the political conflict
between East and West. Although the action of the novel takes place in
Europe, it is set against the backdrop of the Israeli invasion of
Lebanon, and when it came out in 1995 the atrocities committed against
the Arabs in the camps of Sabra and Shatila were still vivid in people's
minds. "In that novel I used actual documents and real-life
accounts that had come my way. A journalist had seen the atrocities in
Lebanon and written an article about them but no one agreed to publish
it. I had long talks with her and took down what she said, which was
later incorporated into the text. Of course, it is never a clear-cut
battle between West and East (we should really say, North and South,
because that is where the problem exists...). I feel that well-meaning
westerners can be equally victimized, as the novel I think shows.
Bernard, the left-wing journalist who is prepared to take risks in order
to point out the truth, is a good example of that." In the wake of
political upheavals and a presiding sense of unrest in the Middle East,
was it Taher's distance from home that brought out his sense of
belonging in a striking way?
"All
the time I was away," he recalls, "I was totally engrossed by
Egypt. Doubtless the experience of living abroad gives you an
opportunity to see your society in a fresh light ? that is, of course,
if you genuinely belong to that society. Whereas you know as well as I
do that many Egyptians who travel to the West simply dissolve and forget
their homeland. I feel it is a question of belonging, whether or not you
belong somewhere. Even at the personal level, you know, in everyday
life, I belonged wholly to Egypt. Living abroad was only a way of
confirming that. For example... I'll tell you a strange story. Before I
became an expatriate, particularly because of my work in the culture
channel of the Egyptian radio, I was reading a great deal of western
literature, but as soon as I had settled in the West I found myself
reading only Arabic ? this will symbolically reveal the effect of living
abroad. Incidentally," he laughs, "none of this has prevented
me from marrying a European woman."
Interestingly,
in his most recent works Taher has frequently returned to the vision of
a European woman, and to the redeeming power of a love that bridges
differences and obliterates conflict. The story that gives the book its
title is an intensely poetic prose piece in which the narrator meets his
beloved at the point where the river turns into a waterfall. There is no
mention of time, place or national identity, but the implication of the
waterfall is that they are in Europe ? a heavenly Europe of dreams. As
they watch the spray rising in huge waves, "like white peacocks
stretching their wings and then bending them again in a split
second", the narrator is so happy that he says, "Only if this
waterfall were Eternity!" And his beloved replies, "But that's
exactly what it is."
"There
is no [direct] symbolism in my writing," Taher explains. "When
people ask me what this or that might stand for I never have an answer.
All I can see is an image..." It is the image of the waterfall that
one goes away with. A beautiful, fascinating waterfall. And regardless
of his being lionized, there is no doubt that Taher has reached it.