Tag Archives: Egypt

Diary of a Country Prosecutor

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Diary of a Country Prosecutor (also published under the title Maze of Justice) is a partly autobiographical short novel by Tawfik al-Hakim; it was first published in 1937. Al-Hakim based the book on his personal experiences as a Prosecutor.

The narrator is a young Public Prosecutor from Cairo that works in a small town in the Nile delta. He keeps a diary in which he describes his life and thoughts in this rather dull, boring place, surrounded by usually illiterate fellahin and a few a bit more wealthy traders and village dignitaries and state representatives, like the umdah, the local mayor, and the ma’mur, the officer in charge for the public order in the district. Some judges, ushers, legal assistants, and ghafirs (sentries) complete the cast of characters of this novel – almost. Because there are also two somehow elusive characters in the book: the beautiful peasant girl Rim and the mysterious and eccentric Sheikh Asfour who usually knows more about what’s going on than all representatives of the state together but who prefers usually to keep his knowledge for himself.

The book starts with a crime. Someone shot at Kamar al-Dawla Alwan, but there is no visible motif nor is there a suspect. The Public Prosecutor describes the investigation and it is soon obvious that the reader cannot expect a classical whodunit. In fact, the search for the perpetrator is not so much what drives the story, but the absurd way how the law is exercised.

It is revealing what the narrator says about the two judges with whom he is working. One is terribly slow and usually charges all defendants as guilty, the other is terribly fast (because he wants to catch the 11 a.m. train back to Cairo in time every day) and charges also all defendants as guilty. The law is based on the Code Napoleon, a foreign import completely alien to the fellahin who don’t understand anything about it.

“The usher went on calling out names. The type of charge had begun to vary and we were entering a different world, for the judge was now saying to the accused, ‘You are charged with having washed your clothes in the canal!’ – ‘Your honor – may God exalt your station – are you going to fine me just because I washed my clothes?’ – ‘It’s for washing them in the canal.’ – ‘Well, where else could I wash them?’ – The judge hesitated, deep in thought, and could give no answer. He knew very well that these poor wretches had no wash basins in their village, filled with fresh flowing water from the tap. They were left to live like cattle all their lives and were yet required to submit to a modern legal system imported from abroad. – The judge turned to me and said, ‘The Legal Officer! Opinion, please.’ – ‘The state is not concerned to inquire where this man should wash his clothes. Its only interest is the application of the law.’ – The judge turned his glance away from me, lowered his head, shook it and then spoke swiftly like a man rolling a weight off his shoulders: ‘Fined twenty piastres. Next case.’”

Even more outrageous is a case in which the ‘speedy’ judge is in charge:

“A decrepit bent-backed man with a white beard came forward, hobbling on a stick. The judge pounced on him with a question: ‘You expended reserved wheat?’ – ‘it was my wheat, your honor, and I ate it with my family.’ – ‘Pleads guilty. One month with hard labour!’ – ‘A month! Do you hear, Muslims! My own wheat, my own crop, my own property…!’ – The policeman dragged him away. As he went, he stared at those in court with goggling eyes as though he could not believe that he had heard the sentence aright. Surely his ears must have deceived him and the spectators must have heard the truth. For he had stolen no man’s wheat. It is true that the usher had visited him and ‘reserved’ his wheat, appointing him as a trustee until such time as he paid the government tax. But the pangs of hunger had seized him violently – him and his family; so he had eaten his own wheat. But who could possibly regard him as a thief on that account and punish him for stealing? It was impossible for this old fellow to understand a law which called him a thief for eating his own harvest, sown by his own hands. These were crimes invented by the law to protect the money of the government or of private creditors; but they were not natural crimes in the eyes of the poor farmer, whose simple instinct could not find any sin in them. He knows well enough that assault is a crime, and murder is a crime, and theft is a crime; for all these involve an obvious aggression against somebody else and reveal clear and evident moral turpitude. But ‘expending reserved property’ – and this was something whose principle and definition he could not grasp. For him it was purely a formal, legalistic crime, whose impact he must go on enduring without believing in it at all.”

Tawfik al-Hakim’s book is first of all a powerful attack on the state of the legal system in his home country, which didn’t even try to establish justice – but ‘the law’. It shows the situation in its full absurdity and frequently with a savage humor that borders the macabre: there is a scene where the town barber, under the supervision of the Public Prosecutor and a pathologist, is dragging corpse after corpse out of first one grave and then another in a muddled attempt to locate the body of a woman who has been murdered. ‘The comedy is grim, but comedy it is’, as Booker Prize Winner P.H. Newby says in his foreword to the edition I read. That someone is arrested for the murder that is clearly innocent, is just adding to the picture.

Al-Hakim was a liberal; he studied law in France in the 1920s and started a career as a Public Prosecutor in Egypt but got quickly very disappointed and pessimistic. He is today considered a classic of modern Arabic literature. He was the Arab world’s leading dramatist, as well as a major writer of novels and short stories. Diary of a Country Prosecutor (elegantly translated by the young Abba Eban, later to become a famous Israeli diplomat and politician) is a brilliant book in the tradition of Gogol and Kafka; and I am afraid that it hasn’t lost its relevance even today.

al-Hakim

 

Tawfik al-Hakim: Diary of a Country Prosecutor, transl. by Abba Eban, Saqi Books, London 2005

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

The key to the Pasha’s library

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As readers of Andre Aciman’s wonderful memoir Out of Egypt will know, Egypt was until the 1950s home of a Levantine Jewish community that lived for most of its history comparatively well integrated and respected in this part of the world.

Multi-cultural Cairo and Alexandria were at that time home to many religious and ethnic minorities that over the centuries had learned to cope with each other in a – mostly – peaceful way. Many members of the Jewish community like the Cattaui family had risen to great wealth and affluence. With the rise of Egyptian nationalism, the wars in 1948 and 1956 and the erection of an authoritarian regime of officers under the leadership of Nasser, this period came abruptly to an end. The Jews were no longer welcome in Egypt and had to leave, usually with very little except their lives and a few clothes.

This is the historical backdrop of two books of memoirs by Lucette Lagnado, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit and The Arrogant Years. Lagnado, a journalist working for major newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, was born in Egypt, where she spent her first years before emigrating via France to the US with her parents and siblings.

The books are covering roughly a century. Whereas The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit focuses mainly on her father, The Arrogant Years is mainly devoted to the life of the author’s mother. Although the two works cover the same period, Lagnado avoids redundancy as much as possible which makes both books worth reading.

The author’s father, Leon, was obviously a larger-than-life figure: he was very tall, good-looking, with impeccable manners and a talent for languages; a boulevardier that liked to go out every evening until late at night; a business man that was so secretive about his business that even his close family members had no idea if his business was thriving or if he was on the verge of bankruptcy; a womanizer that was rumored to have had many affairs (including the charismatic singer Om Kalthoum); a man that was at home with the British officers in Cairo during WWII who dubbed him “the Captain”; but at the same time a devout Jew who observed all rules of his creed and was praying every day in the synagogue; a patriarch with a very traditional mindset when it came to the role of women in the family; but at the same time a very kind and patient father (especially with his youngest daughter, the author).

Edith, the author’s mother, was considerably younger than her husband. Although her background was very different from Leon’s – her family was very poor -, her charm and good looks, together with her good education and humble manners made Leon approach her. The first chapter of Sharkskin which describes the courting makes quite an entertaining read. There was not much romance, the whole affair was conducted in a quite businesslike way by Leon and Alexandra, Edith’s mother, who set the rules for the further proceedings.

But the marriage proved to be a rather unhappy affair. Leon didn’t change his lifestyle of going out late every evening (except Sabbath) without his wife. Edith, who had worked as a very young teacher and librarian for the Cattaui family, the most influential Jewish family in Egypt, had to give up her job she loved so much and was confined to the home where she was supposed to take care of the children and the household, which was de facto dominated by Leon’s mother, a rather stern woman from Aleppo who insisted to speak only Arabic (usually Levantine families like the Lagnados would speak French as native language).

Both parents felt deeply enrooted in Egypt. While more and more of their friends and relatives were leaving the country, they tried to hold out as long as possible. But after a short arrest of the oldest sister Suzette, it is obvious that they have to leave. In Paris, the family which is now completely depended on the support by some organizations that deal with Jewish refugees, has to wait quite a long time until finally being admitted to be resettled in the US.

Life in New York held many difficulties in stock for the Lagnados: Leon, once a quite wealthy and successful businessman, had to support his family with the small earnings he made as a street seller of fake silk ties; the mother’s dream “to rebuild the hearth” fell apart since the older children were step by step going their own way or even leaving home for good. Life in Cairo was better in so many respects for the older generation and the nostalghia they are feeling in relation to their home country doesn’t exactly help them to embrace the American Way of Life that seems so strange to them.

While the author’s father seems to get tired from life and is withdrawing more and more to his prayer books, Edith surprisingly re-invents herself. She applies for a library job and despite lacking degrees or practical experience (except for her work as a young girl in the Cattaui library), she is surprisingly hired. From the author’s descriptions it becomes clear that this – beside her childhood – was probably the happiest time in the life of her mother, who deeply loved (mainly French) literature and who had read the complete Marcel Proust already as a young girl in Cairo.

Lagnado’s books touch on many interesting issues: the school and university system in the US; the typical problems of immigrant children who “try to fit in”; the change of the role of women in family and society that started in the 1960s with the Women’s Lib movement; the role of tradition and religion in the Jewish community; and also the situation of the health sector in the States. Quite a lot of the books deal with the ailments of her parents and herself (Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s in the case of Leon; a series of debilitating strokes in the case of Edith; and Hodgkin’s disease in the case of the author). But that’s not a criticism: this family has had more than their fair share of sufferings.

Lagnado’s books are not only a monument for her parents, but also for a now almost extinct specific Levantine Jewish culture. At the end of both books, she is able to reconnect herself with her own past and the past of this community. After many years, she is visiting Cairo again, standing on the balcony of her former family home in Malaka Nazli (now: Ramses) Street. And somewhere in Switzerland she tracks down the remains of the famous Cattaui library, including the books that were purchased decades ago by her mother who was given the key to the legendary Pasha’s library by the famous Madame Cattaui.

As readers we can feel rewarded that Lagnado shared her family history with us and we can be glad that she was able to make new friends again in her native city. Two truly remarkable and touching memoirs.

Shark_Skin_2 Arrogant

Lucette Lagnado: The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, Ecco Press, New York 2007

Lucette Lagnado: The Arrogant Years, Ecco Press, New York 2011

 

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.


Utopia, resurrected

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Alexandria, the second biggest Egyptian city, has been for most of its history a truly cosmopolitan Mediterranean city. From the time of its foundation by Alexander the Great until the Suez crisis Alexandria housed not only a big Greek community, but also people from all possible different ethnic, national and religious background. When you would walk on the streets of Alexandria one hundred years ago, you would probably hear people on the streets talking to each other in about a dozen different languages.

Alexandria was not paradise, but it was a place where during most of its history, its inhabitants – no matter what their origin was – had learned to get along with each other. (For those who are interested in the history of Alexandria and the other multi-ethnic cities of the Mediterranean Beirut, Smyrna and Saloniki, I would like to recommend a book by the British historian Philip Mansel: Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean, London 2010)

It is therefore easy to understand that Alexandria was and still is a place that inspired the imagination of many writers. The Greek poet Constantin Cavafy spent most of his rather uneventful life in this city and created his poetry here. E.M. Forster devoted two of his works to the city (Alexandria: A History and a Guide and Pharos and Pharillon). His friend Lawrence Durrell used Alexandria as a backdrop of his Alexandria Quartet, a series of four novels. Also several Egyptian (Arabic) authors have made Alexandria the location of some of their most important works, e.g. Naguib Mahfouz’ novel Miramar.

And there is of course a rich autobiographic literature and memoirs of people who have lived in Alexandria, such as the beautiful Out of Egypt, by Andre Aciman, or George Moustaki’s Les Filles de la mémoire (Moustaki’s father owned an antiquarian bookstore in Alexandria).

The collection of short stories Farewell to Alexandria, by Harry E. Tzalas fits into this context. Tzalas, born and educated in Alexandria, emigrated to Brazil in 1956 before settling in Greece where he became the founder and president of the Hellenic Institute for Ancient and Medieval Alexandrian Studies in Athens, a position that brought him frequently back to the city of his youth.

The eleven short stories, written between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, explore the Alexandria of the late 1930s, through WWII, the 1952 revolution and the Suez crisis that ended with the almost complete dispersal of the non-Arabic population of Alexandria.

The characters in Tzala’s stories are taken mainly from his childhood and youth. They come from different social milieus and different religions and are described with great warmth, sensitivity and perception.

There is for example Antoun, a poor Lebanese shoemaker, a simple but good man. One day, a relative of Antoun dies in Beirut, and the hero of the story inherits a modest amount of money. Now the quiet life of work and weekend fishing excursions of Antoun comes to a halt for some time. Should he start his own business now that he has the opportunity and the funds to do so? Should he invest the money somewhere else? What to do with this sudden modest wealth? Antoun doesn’t sleep well for a while until he comes to the probably wise decision to spend the money for the fulfillment of a long existing secret wish: he always wanted a watch! Once he makes up his mind, he goes ahead without further hesitation – he buys watches for all family members and a little radio. And leads his life from that moment on just as if nothing has happened. Not a very exciting or wealthy life, but probably a quite happy one. At least he rose to the status of a watch owner, and that’s probably as far as the ambition of Antoun would lead him. The story ends with a short afterword:

The years passed. I left Alexandria. Osta Antoun died. I got the news when I met an old acquaintance who used to go fishing with us on Sundays. “Antoun passed on,” he said. “May God have mercy on his soul. He was a good man. It was his heart, you know. He was buried holding his watch tightly in his hands.”

Many of the characters in Tzalas’ stories are waiting for something to happen, like the Armenian family in The little Armenian girl that is waiting for the ship to bring them home. But frequently, the expected is not happening, or when it comes finally, something important has changed in the meantime. Life is taking its own course and we are usually not the masters of our destinies.

Some of the stories are particularly moving because they show the fate of families that are stranded in a hostile surrounding during WWII. The front line was not very far away from Alexandria, and the authorities (and some neighbors) were not particularly friendly to the number of Italian or German families that resided in Alexandria. That some of them showed open support and sympathy with the enemy didn’t exactly help to make their lives easier. Frau Grete and Sidi Bishr, October 1942 deals with this aspect, but the stories are never dry history lessons. They always put the spot light on some very interesting and credible characters.

Tzalas’ book breathes a certain melancholy. Because it describes a lost Utopia. But it is thanks to stories like the one’s that Tzalas is telling us, that this Utopia is kept alive at least in our memories:

Alexandria is resurrected for all those who called her Utopia, who have loved her and lost her; the Alexandria of children and poets. (from: Alexandria ad Aegyptum)

The book is illustrated by Anna Boghiguian, an Armenian-Egyptian artist. The illustrations are very evocative and add to the charm of this beautiful collection of stories.

Tzalas

Harry E. Tzalas: Farewell to Alexandria, transl. Susan E. Mantouvalou, illustrated by Anna Boghiguian, The American University of Cairo Press, Cairo, 2004

Philip Mansel: Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (London, John Murray, 2010) 

E.M. Forster: Alexandria: A History and Guide / Pharos and Pharillon, Andre Deutsch, 2004

Lawrence Durrell: The Alexandria Quartet, Faber and Faber 2012

C P Cavafy: Complete Poems, transl. Daniel Mendelsohn, Harper Press, 2013

Georges Moustaki: Les Filles de la mémoire, Editions Calmann-Levy, 1989

Andre Aciman: Out of Egypt: a memoir, I B Tauris, 2006 

Naguib Mahfouz: Miramar, transl. Fatma Moussa Mahmoud, The American University of Cairo Press, Cairo, 1998

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 


A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature

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Tresilian

The Middle East is one of the most important geo-strategic regions in the world. This is due to its geographical position, its richness in oil and gas but also due the nature of the conflicts that are taking place in this region and that have a deep impact on a very big number of people even outside this region. It is therefore reasonable and even important to have an understanding of what is going on in this region that is again very much in the media focus after the Arab Spring and several armed internal conflicts.

What surprised me most when I started to live in the Middle East for several years was that the reality I was facing there is so much more complex and interesting than what an average informed citizen of a western country would expect if he would only follow the media reports in his or her home country. There is a comparatively small number of journalists or political analysts in the West that have the knowledge, the access to media and the ability to explain the complexities of life and politics in the Middle East to the public in their countries in a way that is free of a patronizing attitude and also unbiased regarding the “official” narrative that is always dividing the world neatly into the “good” and the “bad” one’s, i.e. those that are considered worthy to be supplied with the most modern military technology and those who are on the receiving end of this annihilation machinery. The reality is unfortunately more complicated than this Manichean world view suggests: there are no “good” one’s – it’s frequently just about which of the groups involved in a conflict is serving our interests better. Nothing personal, it’s all just about oil, gas and political influence.

In order not to leave the field exclusively to those “experts” who still perpetuate the Orientalist perspective about which Edward Said was writing long and controversial books, it would help already a lot if we would perceive the Middle East as a region where people live that are not really different from us. And what would be easier than to perceive them in the way they are expressing themselves, for example by art, literature, cinema and all other kind of cultural activities. There is a thriving cultural industry in all these countries and since I am dealing here in this blog mainly with literature, I just want to point at the fact that there is an extremely interesting contemporary Arabic literature that is to a growing part available in other languages (some of it is even written in English or French).

In my last blog I wrote up on an interesting novel by Ibrahim al-Koni. I am absolutely convinced that reading his books or the excellent books of Hisham Matar (he writes in English) can give a reader a much better understanding of what’s going on in Libya nowadays. The same is true for the writings of Algerian writers like Boualem Sansal or Yasmina Khadra. The Palestinian/Israeli conflict is presented in western media usually in a very partial and biased way. Those who read Ghassan Khanafani’s stories or the poetic books of Mahmoud Darwish, one of the greatest poets of our times will understand that there is also another side of the story. Readers of Alaa al-Aswany’s “Yacoubian Building” or Edwar al-Kharrat’s novels will have a deeper understanding of the problems of the Egyptian society.

And these are just a few examples. I am not saying that reading novels, stories and poems can replace the serious study of history, political science and other relevant subjects. But great literature can give you an insight in a culture that goes indeed very deep and sometimes much beyond rather dry textbooks. And beside from that it is just sheer pleasure to discover great works like the “Cairo Trilogy” by Naguib Mahfouz, the “Diary of a Country Prosecutor” by Tawfik al-Hakim, the autobiography of Taha Hussein, or the dark masterpieces of Abdurrahman Munif, especially his “Cities of Salt”.

Those who want to have a short overview about Arabic literature have now an excellent opportunity to discover this interesting literary continent. David Tresilian’s “A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature” gives on less than 200 pages a very reader-friendly overview on the history of Arabic literature. In several chronological chapters we learn about the main epochs in modern Arabic literature and are presented the main writers with a very short presentation of their major works.

Tresilian also pays special attention to poetry, the problems of the diaspora, and the development of a publishing industry in a surrounding where authors and publishers are always threatened by censorship or even worse (many Arab authors have been in prison at least once or have been threatened in one way or another for expressing themselves in their books). Book distribution is also a challenge that is hampering the outreach of contemporary Arabic literature in the Middle East, especially outside the capitals. On the other hand, publishing houses in Beirut (the main publishing place in the Middle East) and Cairo seem to thrive and there are a growing number of book fairs and bookstores that attract a growing number of readers. After the Nobel prize was awarded to Naguib Mahfouz, there has been also a (modest) translation boom in the English and German speaking countries at least.

Unfortunately the book is not covering the Maghreb region, although some of the most important Arabic authors origin from there. Literature that is written in other languages than Arabic is equally not considered, even when the authors come from the region. (That excludes for example the excellent novel “Beer in the Snooker Club”, by Waguih Ghali) These limitations were obviously necessary in order not to exceed the size of a “Brief Introduction”. Within these limitations the book is highly recommended to those who wish to discover one of the most interesting literary “continents”.

David Tresilian: A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature, Saqi, London San Francisco Beirut 2008

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.