egyptian literature

Midaq Alley.

Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, making him the first and still the only Arab writer to win that honor, the same year he published his last novel, The Coffeehouse. The Nobel committee’s speech cited several of his works, including his Cairo Trilogy, which the Zimbabwe International Book Fair named as one of the 12 best works of African literature in the 20^th century; and Midaq Alley, which my daughter had to read for her IB English class last year.

Midaq Alley is a slice-of-life work set on one street in Cairo in the 1940s, near the close of World War II, and follows a broad array of characters as they live, work, fall in and out of love, and more. The closest we get to a protagonist is Hamida, the young foster daughter of Umm Hamida, who spends most of the novel trying to find a suitable husband – with finances high on her list of criteria, and her story intersects with those of two other residents of the Alley as well as a well-heeled visitor who sets his sights on her as soon as he arrives. The entire novel is a moment, an attempt to capture Egyptian city life as it sits on the precipice of modernity, with western influences creeping in, technology threatening some traditional jobs, and secular sentiments battling with traditional beliefs. The myriad people living on this street and on these pages are likely a stand-in for Egyptian society as a whole during the last years of the monarchy and the final years of British presence on Egyptian soil.

The alley itself is so small and life there so provincial that everyone knows everyone else’s business, which is part of how Mahfouz can pull off the constant changes in narrative and perspective – although it also seems like there are few real connections among the residents. There’s plenty of gossip, but there isn’t much love lost between them; not once does Mahfouz present us with a true friendship between any two characters, even with the large number of people who cross the page. This aspect of the book lies in the background, even when tragedy strikes at the very end of the novel, where one character makes a choice that will upend several lives yet he has nobody willing to stop him or who might have dissuaded him from his actions.

There’s clearly a lot of cultural context I missed when reading Midaq Alley, and I’m sure I would have benefited from reading it as part of a class, since I know very little of both Egyptian culture and its history outside of what we typically learn in school (ancient Egypt) or what has happened in my lifetime. I was better able to pick up some of the satirical elements, like Zaita, the “cripple-maker,” who gives beggars false deformities or disabilities so they may take in more money while panhandling, or Dr. Booshy, who isn’t a real doctor but provides medical-adjacent services at cut-rate prices and no one wants to know how. Those character archetypes are at least somewhat universal, even if the specifics are unique to Mahfouz’s world, and I could get a handle on them and what they might represent. I was also aware from the very first chapter, where a Quran-quoting poet finds himself out of a ‘job’ because the radio has effectively replaced him, that my lack of knowledge of Arab and Islamic culture would probably wall off some aspects of the novel from me. That’s on me, not the author, but the result was that I didn’t get as much out of Midaq Alley as I might have hoped.

Next up: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, another of my daughter’s books from her last year of high school, and I think her favorite.

Beer in the Snooker Club.

When I read My Uncle Napoleon back in March, longtime reader John Liotta suggested in a comment that I check out Waguih Ghali’s one novel, Beer in the Snooker Club, which he said was an analogous work set in Egypt rather than Iran. It is similar, for sure, perhaps less overtly funny and more satirical, replacing the slapstick of the Iranian novel with a more biting take on the Egyptian independence movement’s failure to provide its people with freedom.

Ram, the novel’s protagonist, and his friend-but-occasional-nemesis Font find themselves in a social and political purgatory in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, which overthrew King Farouk but replaced him with a military dictatorship that implemented its own repressive policies. The withdrawal of the English colonial presence has upended the social order and put Egyptian Copts in an uncertain position where the ruling Muslim authorities threaten their safety while the formerly open English borders have closed. In this context, Ram and Font recall their previous times in London, Ram’s wealthy aunt ‘donates’ her land to the poor while actually selling it to fellaheen (the farmer class), and Ram finds his affections torn between the wealthy Jewish woman Edna (off limits due to her background and class) and the also wealthy but less interesting Egyptian girl Didi.

There’s something overtly feckless and desultory about the entire novel, focused on Ram’s own aimlessness but infecting the entire setting, as if Ghali took the existentialism of Camus or Sartre and married it with the biting parody of Heller or Bulgakov. Ram’s slow realization that la plus ça change leads him to a state of ambition catatonia; he’s stuck, regardless of what he does, and if anything his prospects are worsening because of circumstances entirely beyond his control. He can stay in Egypt, but he’ll be in a religious, ethnic, and political minority (he, like Ghali, is a small-c communist, although Ram’s commitment to its principles is tenuous) at home, yet can no longer move freely to England in the wake of the change of government and the English actions at the time in the Suez. (Egypt’s president after the coup, Gamel Abdul Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, leading Israel to invade the Gaza and the Sinai with support from England and France in a failed effort to reclaim the Canal from Egypt.) Ghali combines the ennui of Camus’ protagonists with the absurdity of political satires of that era, although in this case he’s sending up the Egyptian upper class more than the government itself, which he depicts in the background in a same-as-the-old-boss way.

Ram’s character is the one that Ghali develops over the course of the book beyond the arc of his story, as we see how he went from a somewhat idealistic youth, protected from many of the harsher aspects of life under the autocracy of the king, to a cynical adult who realizes that Nasser’s rule merely switched one set of inequalities for another, establishing a new ruling class to replace the one it upended – a situation that leaves Ram worse off than he was before. It’s bleak, yet not quite hopeless, although the bleakness may have won out in the end for Ghali, as he killed himself in 1969 after more than a decade of living in exile.

Next up: I just finished Elizabeth McCracken’s novel Bowlaway.

Midaq Alley.

Beer in the Snooker Club.

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