Sonallah Ibrahim | Talent is Natural, Skill is Learned

“It was the sky that had sometimes made them seem blue. All the panes were cracked. The facade of the house was yellow and dirty. The gate to the garden was open, propped against the wall. The garden itself was untended and its paving stones were torn up here and there.”

Cigarette papers were perhaps never put to better use than when Sonallah Ibrahim used them as a journal. Compiling his thoughts on society, art, literature, and philosophical arguments gleaned from tabloids and overheard conversations, Ibrahim’s Notes from Prison are a porthole into the writer’s mind during his forced stay at Al-Wahat. The Notes, now being released with a new translation of Ibrahim’s breakout novel, That Smell, span the gamut from musings on colors, “Colors and their meanings. Red is love. Yellow jealousy. Blue sadness. Green loyalty. White purity. Purple yearning” to declarations on writing and art, “The writer is responsible for every word he writes.” Ibrahim’s writing soul vibrates off the pages; he intimately reveals himself to his readers.

One confession – although it is no surprise to those who know Ibrahim’s past – is that he is “a Communist first, a writer after that.” Living in Egypt under totalitarian and ideologically terroristic regimes, Ibrahim and other members of the Inteligencia turned to the east, to Russia and the Soviets, for guidance. Even before that, Ibrahim admits that he had a thirst for Robin Hood, The Three Musketeers, and other adventure stories. The stories left impressions on Ibrahim’s mind and certainly influenced his political loyalties. However, Ibrahim became a Communist in 1954 primarily, as Robyn Creswell, translator of the new edition of Ibrahim’s novel and notes reveals, “for literary reasons.”

Ibrahim seems to have learned a great deal from not only the stories he loved as a child but also from the literary elite who joined the Democratic Movement for National Liberation and once in prison, the nationalists, anti-fascists, and other Egyptian communists. However, Ibrahim’s novel, That Smell, is not directly about his time in prison nor is it directly about Cairo under Nasser’s Arab Socialist Union. That Smell is a post political novel in the way Vaclav Hovel described Czechoslovakia as “post totalitarian” in Power of the Powerless. Ibrahim reveals the monotony of daily life as a citizen under house arrest after being released from prison. However, the novel is also a literary device used to highlight life for all citizens in Egypt in that time. Ibrahim’s hero, perhaps an anti-hero, simply goes about his day. This is not a drama or a comedy although there are perhaps dramatic or comedic elements in the piece. This work is true tranche de vie – true slice of life. Ibrahim declares in his Notes that he must tell the truth. For Ibrahim, this means exposing the soporific reality of life as a servant of the State. Ibrahim understands society at a profound level of detail and his ability to forge his own style while still drawing on great predecessors such as Hemmingway is astounding.

The new translation of That Smell features a bold introduction from Ibrahim. He writes, “If you do not like the novel now between your hands, the fault isn’t ours.” He goes on to declare that if the reader does not like the novel it is because of the “shallow-ness” and “conventionalism” of our contemporary “cultural moment.” When writing his novel, Ibrahim understood that he needed, as Crewell writes, “a style that [was] aggressively unliterary.” This is, of course, because only through an entirely new form, which was only slightly reminiscent of past forms, could Ibrahim hope to bring about change. Ibrahim’s novel is about a man’s daily business but it is also about the hopeless and boring existence of modern society. If Soviets poets needed to tell the truth about Stalin, Ibrahim needed to speak out about Nasser. The only caveat is that Ibrahim writes in a style, which may startle and upset many readers. Not only is Ibrahim’s story monotonous, his writing style is equally repetitive. Almost every sentence begins with a pronoun and there are very few sentences which utilize complex grammatical phrases, punctuation marks beyond the most common three or four hardly ever appear, and Ibrahim is fundamentally against writing with the flowery language associated with Arabic poetry or modern writing. Instead, Ibrahim takes a lesson from Hemmingway and exercises restraint. This is not, however, to suggest that the experience of reading Ibrahim’s novel is a boring one. Not at all. Instead, reading Ibrahim’s novel is akin to reading a report of a man’s life as told by the man while reading from his journal. The joy of reading this novel comes from the knowledge that it is fiction, the journal and the stories which seem so monotonous and real are works of Ibrahim’s imagination.

The most exciting parts of the novel, perhaps, are the flashback italics sections, which pepper Ibrahim’s novel. Taken from Hemmingway, the style evokes a higher plane of storytelling and introduces a richness that the novel is otherwise lacking. The truth of the matter is that That Smell might be as close as modern literature will ever get to what Emile Zola and Chekov, Ernest Hemmingway and Melville were striving towards. The beauty of this is that Ibrahim had never read any of these writers before writing his novel. Several of his Notes refer to a seeming laundry-list of tasks he must complete, “Must look for something new…” he scribbles down in a flood of philosophic prose, “Life will have no meaning unless we stop at once and look at it and see all the things we have been blind to . . . unless we look at everything that lies below the surface, unless our curiosity is fired by the miracle of the everyday.” Ibrahim was searching for his voice, but Ibrahim was also searching for meaning. In Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl, Frankl writes that those men in the concentration camps who did not have anything left to hope for immediately lost their will to live and were dead within days. Ibrahim seems to have survived in the pressure-cooker of prison primarily through his desire for knowledge. His notes, dated from 1962 to 1964, are his survival journal. They are a direct link to Ibrahim’s thoughts and literary experiences while in prison. Even the most cryptic, “April 3, shots. The wounding of Louis Ishaq, then his death. Peace of mind?” speaks volumes to those who can learn more about the political climate of the time. Ibrahim brings together the mundane with the chaotic much as the natural world of modern life does.

Ibrahim’s novel, once censored for being obscene, and for showing a hero who was not as virile as those in the socialist realist writings of the time, is a profound work that had great impact on the literary community and collective population it was created in and for. However, larger audiences benefit from this new translation and from Ibrahim’s other works because it is a study in specificity and form, a study highlighting the beauty of restraint and in telling life exactly how it is or may be. That Smell and Notes from Prison are a powerful reminder of what modern life actually is and stands in the face of all the modern dreck which annihilates any need for thought or philosophical interrogation and analysis.

Jeremy Davidson, PWF