Books for the People: Populist Concerns in Contemporary Egyptian Literature

Author and Activist Alaa Al-Aswany leading a Cultural Salon. (photo credit: NYT)

Note: Many links are unavailable as the Egyptian government continues its internet ban.

On Friday, January 28, during the most violent of Egypt’s protests since they began on January 25, WikiLeaks released several US Embassy Cables which discussed the increasing role of bloggers as political activists. The media has focused predominately on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as centers for activism and mobilization. However, blogs and contemporary literature fueled the revolution in another way–by igniting discourse.

Blogs, though still censored, are able to bypass traditional publishing outlets which are heavily controlled by the government. The world of internet blogging allows people to air their opinions more freely. According to one anonymous blogger (name X’ed out on cables), blogging allowed Egyptian youth to talk about topics that were “unimaginable five years ago.” Topics range from Muslim/Christian tensions, the military, women’s rights, sexual harassment, and job scarcity. The cables report that the majority of bloggers are between 20 to 35 years old, the same demographic that led Tuesday’s uprising.

The language of the blogosphere carried over into other mediums. Blogs are mostly written in colloquial Arabic, or, 3ammeya, which is different from the Classic Arabic that is used in literature. Blog talk is synonymous with street talk: slangy, intimate, frank. Writers and activists felt a need to talk about the issues of the street, what every day Egyptians are feeling and experiencing. The most influential books in recent years became popular because they pushed the censors, told the truth, and incorporated populist landscapes into their work.

These kinds of books are often the most difficult to get published. Even after publication they risk getting pulled from the shelves. “Writers must fight against censorship but also support literature…We live with censorship. We must survive with it. We don’t accept it but we live with it,” says Khaled al-Khamissi, the author of Taxi. There are variations to this strategy–some writers choose not to publish in Egypt at all. Some writers publish (though still at risk) with small presses, often safeguarding that their books will never get read by the people. For Alaa Al-Aswany, a lifelong struggle with government agencies leads him to publish with an independent press, and in this case, his book does get read. The overwhelming results speak for themselves. (More below).

Two books that have met critical and commercial success in Egypt despite problems with censorship are Taxi by Khaled al-Khamissi (2007) and The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa Al-Aswany (2002). Both are bestsellers that have been translated into many languages, drawing attention to Arabic literature internationally. Both writers have a shared disinterest in linguistic pyrotechnics and showy elitism, and declare their works as books for the people. Both are bloggers and political activists.

Taxi is a book that captures the pulsing smog and shimmer of Cairo’s streets through a series of interviews and anecdotes with Cairo’s taxi drivers. The book contains beautiful moments, but more so there are ugly, painful realities that are being uncovered daily as the protests continue. The dialogue is written in blunt colloquial Arabic and gives much-needed voice to the ignored populous; Khamissi highlights this with an epigraph from Paulo Coelho’s Maktub, which tells the story of a humble juggler who, despite his own embarrassment, juggles two oranges before the baby Jesus and is rewarded by being the only monk present allowed to hold the infant on his lap. “I have tried to relate these stories as they are, in the language of the street–a special, blunt, vital and honest language quite different from the language of salons and seminars that we are used to,” Khamissi writes in his introduction; these are “words that need to be said.”

Between the bribes taxi drivers must pay to the police and the duplicity of the government and the unwelcome influence of rich foreigners, Taxi‘s 58 small vignettes add up to a scathing expose that reveals the corruption and injustices of Egyptian governance. It is a government that has dealt heavy blows to its poorest and least educated.

Taxi drivers are often too old, too young, too poor, or too well-educated. They work under inhuman, backbreaking conditions, their lungs assaulted daily by fumes and dust. The passengers they carry through the sprawling city all have stories of their own. Every story in Taxi has thousands of real-life counterparts. (The vignettes are called “fictional dialogues,” although they are obviously about real people and events, perhaps to escape libel charges.)

In Story #18, the cab driver reveals to the “narrator” that his son is in the Cancer Institute and that the medical fees are insurmountable. While the narrator pities the driver and gives him a large tip, the narrator’s friend scoffs: “That’s a story that’s repeated often. That must have happened to me a hundred times. We’ve become a nation of beggars. You’ve never heard that?” This episode is fittingly placed one-third of the way through the book; at the moment readers begin to question the likelihood of so much suffering in a “democratic” country. Perhaps this is the only real disclaimer Khamissi offers, as if to say: I am human too, I can only draw conclusions through what I observe to be true, and even if only half these stories turn out to be true they should be enough to break your heart.

Alaa Al-Aswany has been a political activist longer than he has been a novelist. (His father was a famous activist-lawyer.) Since 1993, Al-Aswany has written a column of political and social issues. He hosts a cultural salon that has become such a liability that cafe owners have screamed for his group to go away. (The cafe owner later apologized, saying he was being watched by government officials.) Al-Aswany is also a member of Kefaya (“Enough”), a grassroots coalition that opposes the presidency of Hosni Mubarak.

This week, Aswany took to the streets alongside young Egyptians, demanding justice, equality, dignity. He writes in The Guardian’s “Comment is free” blog: “A democratic regime might fail to beat poverty, but the people enjoy freedom and dignity.”

The Yacoubian Building is a novel about how Egypt under the current regime fails to provide these very basic human rights–freedom and dignity–to its people. The novel interweaves the stories of characters from all classes and walks of life. They are residents in the Yacoubian Building, an actual historical building in Downtown Cairo.

There is the wealthy, aged Zaki Bey el Dessouki, an inveterate womanizer who speaks French, drinks Johnny Walker Black, and gets vitamins shot into his ass in preparation for his women visitors. There is Taha, the idealistic son of the building’s bawab, who gets his dreams crushed by the corrupt police system, and eventually joins an extreme Islamist group. Equally disheartening is Taha’s girlfriend Busayna, a beautiful young woman forced to endure sexual harassment on the job. But as there is no justice for her, no one standing up for any woman; she has to find other ways to survive. A homosexual newspaper editor falls in love with a poor police officer and the doomed relationship leads to a crime of passion.

Of all these stories (and there are more) the most sickening are the stories about the machinations of government officials who are as corpulent as they are corrupt. Even Mubarak makes an appearance in this novel, although he is referred to only as “the Big Man.” The Big Man never comes out of the shadows, but the characters always know he is there, demanding 50 percent of the profits, or else.

True, this is all “fiction,” and in fiction we are presented with holograms, not flesh and blood. But Al-Aswany relates a telling anecdote in the preface to The Yacoubian Building. Years before, he had been trying to publish a novel in which the protagonist mocks the nationalist leader Mustafa Kamil who said, “If I weren’t Egyptian, I would want to be an Egyptian.” A younger Al-Aswany had naively believed that the opinions expressed in his novel were no big deal, as it was the sentiment expressed daily on the streets. (Also echoed by Khamissi, who was forced to take out certain well-known stories and jokes that would have landed him in jail.) So, in hopes of being published, Al-Aswany took his novel to the General Egyptian Book Organization, a government agency funded by tax payers. After the employee of the committee looked at his book, he said:

“I can’t possibly publish this book.”

“Why?”

“Because you insult Egypt.”

“I don’t insult Egypt.”

“You make fun of the leader Mustafa Kamil.”

“I don’t make fun of him. I love and respect Mustafa Kamil. The one who makes fun of Mustafa Kamil is Isam Abd el Ati, the hero of the novel.”

“Do you want me to believe you don’t agree with what you said even though you’re the one who wrote it?”

Al-Aswany and the employee continued to argue about whether a fiction writer could be responsible for the views of his protagonist, as if the writer were the protagonist. The anecdote ends with the employee requiring Al-Aswany to write a disclaimer to say that he, the writer, shared none of the opinions of his protagonist. After Al-Aswany wrote the disclaimer the committee nevertheless refused to publish the book. Eventually, Al-Aswany stopped seeking out government agencies.

The Yacoubian Building was published by a small but renowned press, Dar Merit, which took great risk in publishing the book. “I have no choice but to praise the Lord,” Al-Aswany says in describing the events that followed. The book quickly became the bestselling Arabic novel and stayed there for five years, taken down to second place only after the publication of his next novel, Chicago. He writes that Egyptians approach him daily in the streets to thank him for writing his book. This kind of outpouring comes only from the writing–earnest, convincing, unsettling–of the truth.

Post Script: AlJazeera’s license has been revoked and they are to close their bureau in Cairo today (1/30). Additionally, the Arab world’s largest book fair, that would be taking place right now in Cairo, has been postponed indefinitely.