The introduction in Banipal 25 puts the featured writers into their geographical and political context, Marie-Thérèse Abdel-Messih writes: “Egyptian narrative arrived at a state of crisis and uncertainty during the last years of the twentieth century as the new generations of Egyptian writers began casting aside the presumptions of the post-independence period, of writers and artists being prophets of the nation, of art as epiphany.” For the Egyptian writers in Banipal 25, “Narrative has become a covert political activity. By revealing the masks that shield the self - as well as the single party state - the new writing debunks the heroic unified self, the totalitarian idea of nation, and the single voice.”

The first Egyptian writer featured is Hamdy Abowgliel. The excerpts from his novel, ‘Thieves of Retirement’, begin with: “Suppose that the life you think is your own, the life you are living at this very moment, is really the life of a character in some novel.” Like much of the writing in this issue of Banipal, the first person narrative seems almost autobiographical in its attention to everyday circumstances. A number of images dominate the memory after reading these excerpts - the twin girls who died because their placentas were not closed; the woman who sticks a needle into the skull of each baby boy born to her co-wife; the colourful figure of Um Gamal.

Alaa al-Aswany’s two short stories have a similar autobiographical/confessional style, so that whether they are completely fictitious or not, they seem more real than most Western short stories where formal techniques create distance between reader and text. The second of al-Aswany’s stories has two parts which contrast two relationships - one an affair that leads to the woman having an abortion, and the other an infatuation with a modest and pious girl who wears a headscarf. The hypocritical nature of patriarchy, and the male double standard comes out in this juxtaposition. In the first section, the male narrator is clearly unprepared to marry the woman, while the second woman is more suitable - ie, virginal and chaste.

Mansoura Ez-Eldin (who will be touring the UK in August with three other Banipal writers) offers an extract from her novel, Maryam’s Maze, where the more omniscient voice allows the narrative to wind like a thread through the characters and their relationships and histories. Many of the writers in this issue of Banipal offer their thoughts on current Egyptian writing. Ez-Eldin writes:“The best way to describe the new writing in Egypt - if we can use this expression - is that it yearns to transcend reality, be it through an infusion of fantastic elements that mock and transform it into an object of ridicule, or through styles of absolute neutrality.” There is an element of this neutrality in the excerpt from ‘Maryam’s Maze’.

Ibrahim Farghali’s ‘The Monotonous Rhythm of the Years of Drought’ is one of the shortest stories. The male narrator has been instructed by his partner to meet his ex-lover. Suspecting the worst, that his fidelity is about to be tested, he goes along anyway. Past and present fuse briefly and what is not stated resonates within the text, giving the brief story more depth than you might expect.

In Montasser El-Qaffash’s novel ‘To See Now’, a man finds himself forgetting the names and faces of others, to the extent that he even has trouble remembering his wife’s features. Photography becomes a means to remember as he takes pictures of her, but these pictures fall into the wrong hands, and his wife leaves him. Told in the third person, there is little dialogue in relation to description and exposition which allows for a fluid form of storytelling.

The novel, ‘Being Abbas el Abd’ by Ahmed Alaidy, plays with text layout, onomatopoeic words, line breaks, and font, and contrasts with the previous novel extract in its strong use of dialogue and short immediate descriptions of characters and their actions. Alaidy reduces paragraphs to single sentences, breaking to a new line like a poet-turned-filmmaker. Dry humour mixes with darker images played out in brief flashbacks of the narrator’s childhood - when he was locked in a fridge, or tied to a bed with cockroaches crawling over his face in the dark. There’s an interesting section towards the end that’s worth quoting here:

“Egypt had its Generation of the
Defeat.
We’re the generation that came after
it. The I’ve-got-nothing-more-to-lose
generation.
We’re the autistic generation, living
under the same roof with strangers
who have names similar to ours.
This is my father, this is my mother,
and these, by elimination, must be my
brothers and sisters.”

Later, there’s an astute and memorable comment made by one of the characters: “Anyone who reads the history of most Third World countries will discover a painful tragedy. Many have been liberated by the Revolution from ‘the foreign occupier’ only to fall into the clutches of ‘the national occupier’.”

There are two short stories from Haytham al-Wardany. The second, ‘Pissing on the World’, sees three young males rebelling through urinating in various places - at the headmaster’s door, the entrances of elegant buildings, cinema seats, phone booths, waiting rooms, and on the name and logo of a bank - until someone catches them and they have to run away. I was reminded of something another writer, Mustafa Zikri, says in Banipal: “This is a genre of writing we might call existential, naked, returning to the glorious era of Albert Camus. It is of a form that belongs to the individual, that turns away from the collective, and that views with suspicion issues of politics, history and society.”

In Safaa Ennagar’s ‘Amoeba’, a woman with a beautiful body and unattractive face eventually finds a husband, but as soon as she’s married, she’s forced to abandon her tight clothes and stockings in favour of more modest attire. She finds sensual fulfilment in the simple act of doing the laundry, as her loose gown becomes damp from washing clothes, and clings to her body. This is a beautifully written story, that while dealing with an individual situation in a simple and non-ideological way, reflects wider gender issues, and brings to mind the western feminist mantra, that the personal is political.

Ashraf Abdelshafy offers two stories – ‘Bus Stop’, an obliquely told and very short story, and ‘Imagination Suits the Blind’, a slightly longer and, for me, more interesting work. In the latter, the narrator’s prejudiced opinions contrast with the views of a blind man which are presented as metaphorically blind. “I treated Ali’s convictions… with sympathy and did not challenge him in my capacity as a sighted individual.” The narrator is both narrow minded and hypocritical in his attitudes towards women, a representative of prevalent patriarchal views.

’On the Occasion of Life’ is an excerpt from Yasser Abd el-Hafez’s novel, which recounts the story of the one-handed man who liked to weep and confess his sins loudly at the mosque during Ramadan, so that others, including drug dealers, would turn up to hear his secrets. His son becomes the leader of the family, dealing in drugs, who is brought down by a local law enforcement officer. American culture threads through this excerpt - with references to the Mafia, and the arresting officer resembling “a sheriff in a cowboy movie”. There’s a meandering quality to the narrative as it weaves round different characters, and it never loses a sense of humour, even in the darker moments.

There’s a short story next from Waiel Ashry, ‘Going to Williamsburg’, which is set around New York. Though the environment and setting of this piece contrasts with the other works, it fits nevertheless with the other writing. Eschewing a conventional narrative, it’s a story that successfully mixes observations about the New York and Williamsburg locals, with other threads, so that it reads like a kind of half-fiction, half-autobiography.

Mohammed Mustagab, who died last year, is represented by two pieces - a short story called ‘The Hired Killer’, and the true story, ‘Ola the Hit man’. The stories are the fictionalised and real accounts of a meeting with a hit man who worked within the honour killing system. In the second and real account, “He told me about his latest job: strangling the village headman in the Shuruq on the special request of the dead man’s sister.” This is a matter-of-fact killer who acts as a polite host to his guests, and refuses to take jobs from women who want their husbands assassinated. It’s an eye-opening glimpse into the world of honour killing.

On the poetry side, Iman Mersal kicks things off with two poems, ‘The Threshold’, and ‘Alternative Geography’. Both have a prose-poem feel, and I particularly liked the first poem, ‘The Threshold’, which is full of surreal lines and images threaded together with ironic subversion. ‘Alternative Geography’ is set in Canada, where the poet now lives. I especially liked the following lines in this poem:“On another continent you left miserable enemies, / you can only feel ashamed of yourself when you remember them. / Nothing angers you now. It’s difficult to meet a classical communist here. / They even put a clock up in government offices instead of the president’s picture.”

There are two poems from Fatima Naoot. Both at times are reminiscent of streams of consciousness in the flow of memorably juxtaposed images. In the first poem, ‘And I Wait’, Naoot writes: “The dark Moroccan woman / who resembles a light / seeping from a peep-hole window / told me that seagulls never rest on water / because the fish in their bellies / are salted, like repentant sardines, / and he who repents for a guilt / starts a new one.”This poem is a beautiful and lyrical piece to be read over and over. Zahra Yusri’s poem ‘It’s Night’ is also very beautiful. The short lines of the early part of the poem are like a river of words and images, flowing fast until the lines become longer, slow down. It’s a lovely sensual work.

Nagat Ali has two poems. ‘The General’ begins: “This good General / who resembles my father / is late for his date…” He attends a party where he is clearly out of place, uncomfortable. “Drinks are not enough / to make him forget the bitterness of wars / he grudgingly fought”. For me there was an ambiguity in this poem, and I was left wondering whether the general was indeed the narrator’s father. The narrator’s father is mentioned again in ‘The Necessity of Knowing Freud and Lacan’. This is a more intimate work, which in just a few lines, threads the personal, erotic and intellectual together.

The lyrical excerpts from Rana al-Tonsi’s collection ‘A Rose for the Last Days’ are haunted by military images too, particularly the first poem:“In my country / soldiers go to a war / where they never fight”. Death too haunts the lines and images in these poems: “Every time I think of my own death / someone else dies / and the poem keeps / writing itself”.

Emad Abu Saleh’s poem, ‘Silence’, begins: “Let us stop for one minute / Tomorrow at one o’clock in the afternoon / for one minute. / The workers and the machines.” The lines that follow describe the frozen images: a thief with his hand in the safe, a tear that stops between eye and mouth, a baby half born. But it’s the conclusion of the poem that it is most memorable: “There she is / hung at the seventh floor / that suicide-girl / If you allowed the man / to catch her from his balcony / bullets would find an excuse / to harvest the children’s heads.” The poem goes on:“Yes. / Like this / we shall stop / and together we will think / and then we might understand what has happened.” The second poem, ‘First Step’, is a simple series of questions and answers between a child and her mother which address death and the irrational nature of human conflict and killing.

Tamer Fathy, who worked in his parents’ clothing and dry cleaning business, began researching the life of clothes, and his debut collection ‘Yesterday I Lost a Button – The Story of Clothes’, is written from the clothes’ perspective. Three poems from the collection appear in Banipal. In Defect, he writes: “The clothes that lost a button / or had their fabric damaged, / have their own sadness, / their still facial expressions, / their isolation…”

Emad Fouad also gives life to an inanimate object in ‘Lonely in Her Distant Corner’, where “We betrayed her / this old sofa / that breaks to pieces now…” The couch is an object which though neglected, stirs memories, and becomes a means to elliptically address the early days of the relationship between the narrator and his partner.

In addition to all of this, there are two wonderful excerpts from Ibrahim al-Koni’s novel, ‘The Seven Veils of Seth’. The first excerpt, titled, ‘The Strategist’, brims with a kind of tongue-in-cheek humour as the inhabitants of an oasis send out various people - a fool, a sage, and a diviner - to find out about the stranger who has arrived. The stranger outwits each messenger, causing the locals increasing anxiety and apprehension regarding his intentions. The second excerpt, ‘The Women’, is a beautifully told and self-contained narrative that appears to centre on the stranger, or at least on someone who has travelled across the desert. Removing his clothes and his veil, he bathes in a spring at the edge of the oasis, where he surfaces to the sight of a group of beautiful women watching him. It is unclear whether they are human, or female jinn. A lively and flirtatious conversation ensues between the stranger and the women, which is particularly interesting since part of the discussion centres on the man appearing without his veil, in breach of ‘the Law’. There is a short article by Hartmut Fähndrich which explores Ibrahim al-Koni’s central theme of the desert, rooting the author’s work in South Libya and in the Tuareg, a nomadic people whose way of life is about to disappear. Al-Koni’s work is a testament to his people.

Following this there is a fascinating and thought-provoking article by Khaled Mattawa on both his own literary influences, and on the theme of literary influences in general, which explores different ideas and theories, including the idea that modern poets are in a kind of Oedipal struggle with the writers of the past. He looks at literary genealogy - for example, that Poe translated into French influenced Baudelaire who, translated into English, influenced TS Eliot.

Banipal editor, Margaret Obank interviews Jane Spender, editor of PEN international about the history of PEN, and the unacceptably small PEN presence in the Arab world. There are also a number of book reviews and other short pieces worth reading in the magazine. Banipal 25 offers a fascinating collection of writing, and it’s also worth mentioning that there’s a small piece on Egyptian writer and publisher Mohammed Hashem, who recently received the 2006 Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Award which goes to a publisher outside the US who has demonstrated courage and fortitude in the face of political persecution and restrictions on freedom of expression. Mohammed Hashem through his independent publishing house Dar Merit in Cairo has published many of the young authors featured in this issue of Banipal.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.