Bahaa Taher: Dreams no longer exist

In a recent interview, when asked, “What ever happened to the Egyptians?” (a civilization that Socrates himself argued far surpassed the achievements of the Ancient Greeks), Arabic writer Bahaa Taher recalls his idyllic youth as a 1950s leftist radio commentator and offers: “Dreams no longer exist. We have exchanged our dreams of changing the country and the nation with the American dream of individual and material success.”

Taher's Sunset Oasis (winner of the inaugural 2008 International Prize for Arabic Fiction and lucidly translated by Arabic scholar Humphrey Davies) is a complex, mesmerizing and loosely “historical” fiction that anticipates Egypt's current spiritual-cultural disarray via the insidiously “polite” lens of 19th-century British colonialism.

Mahmoud Effendi Abd el Zahir, an “unruly,” existentially crisis-ridden Egyptian police officer, has been promoted to the post of “District Commissioner” (see ministerial tax collector) over the ancient, volatile and impossibly debt-ridden Siwa Oasis. But, this is no coveted placement. Simply getting to the place proves perilous. Situated along the remote Egyptian/Libyan border, caravans must cross an unforgiving desert crawling with wolves, hyenas, snakes and scorpions, and stymied by heat, cold and ceaseless grit.

Most devastating, however, are the sandstorms – “white dust devils,” roaring “vortices” capable not only of erasing all navigational markers but also of “stoning” and literally “swallowing” the navigator whole (according to the ancient historian Herodotus, the Persian tyrant Cambyses II misplaced an army of 50,000 men amid one such storm).

Siwa is also a politically explosive civilization fortified by a maze of stone walls. Within these walls, the Siwans themselves nurture a notorious “killing malice” as strident Eastern and Western clans vie for hegemonic control. Naturally, the mortality rate is rising; militaristic Siwan cultivators have already murdered several puppet mayors and two recent District Commissioners.

For his part, Mahmoud is resigned: “I know very well I am going to the place where it is my destiny to be killed” – an acceptance that the British Minister of Internal Affairs blandly confirms: Not only will Mahmoud develop a distinct taste for tyranny, but should he fail in his colonial duty, the penalty will “not be his return to Cairo.”

Last, there are the women: Dusky Ni'ma, an enchanting Arab slave girl from Mahmoud's squandered youth, who, between heady interstices of gorgeous love-making, spins wondrous tales of adventure; obdurate Catherine is Mahmoud's Irish-Catholic wife and an amateur antiquities scholar; and, finally, “Saint” Fiona, Catherine's untouchable, more beautiful sister, who, by virtue of her inspiring gift for spinning politically-inspiring allegory, wins Mahmoud's heart.

Notwithstanding these pitfalls, the Crown (with an eye to the grand Suez Canal) must have its back taxes and “disgraced” Mahmoud, whose youthful anti-colonial sympathies have come back to haunt him, seems the most literally “expedient” candidate for the job.

Taher is a consummately fair socio-political critic; few characters emerge entirely unscathed. But it is the unsaid that most exposes. With a “sudden, crafty smile,” Mahmoud's British adviser, a “Mr. Harvey,” tosses up one particularly delectable “perk” associated with Mahmoud's new posting: Native traditions that separate the men from the women in boyhood “do not concern us,” he says. “It is a matter of no interest to us. We have nothing to do with their primitive customs.” Mahmoud's reaction to this muted sanction of juvenile rape simply chills: “I understood what he was trying to say but did not respond. So he started addressing the invisible thing to his right again.”

Sunset is also an ambitious philosophical query into the natures of history, betrayal, passion and fiction – massive themes each, which Taher filters through an estranging prism of glancing monologues. Sunset's characters rarely connect. Mahmoud's soul is irretrievably “scattered”: “Why did that settledness never come? Why does it remain elusive and out of reach?”

Despite a scaffold of “documentary” backdrop – an author's note referring to the “real” name of the fictional protagonist, a postscript that invites the curious reader “interested in comparing reality with imagination” to do so, and a translator's note that offers a glossary of 19th-century Egyptian politics – both Taher and his translator repeatedly caution the reader against seeing Sunset as simply a “historical” novel. History, for Taher, is a fictional construct (a drama of ever-glancing voices). We are foreigners, even to ourselves; better to tell stories.

Enter Richard Burton – British consul, prolific ethnographer and “soft porn” tourist – whose “scholarly” “Annotation No. 7” is here cited – word for extraordinary word – at the start of this review. Burton's most renowned contribution to Victorian letters was his privately printed translation of The Thousand Nights and One Night (1885-1888). And contrary to more praiseworthy accounts, The Nights' overwhelming popularity was due largely to what one biographer called Burton's “pungent” annotations, which navigated the supposedly “darker” shades of Eastern sexual practice.

So how does Burton's annotated pungency relate to Taher's own sense of history, eros and story? At one point, Mahmoud ponders his final betrayal of Dusky Ni'ma, calling himself “Major Shariyar” – a reference to the infamous King of The Thousand Nights who, having been sexually betrayed by his first queen, nightly decapitates a serial host of post-coital virgins. But unlike Burton, who promotes racist, sexual prurience as scholarly ethnographic annotation, Taher beautifully restores the politics of Eros by heralding Ni'ma as the inimitable Scheherazade of Sunset Oasis: “When she drew close to me,” Mahmoud relays, “I'd smell the penetrating scent of Egyptian jasmine that seemed to spring from the very pores of her skin.” And then she'd tell stories.

This is one of the few wondrous, and deeply affecting pauses in Sunset Oasis – a kind of swoon that washes over. Devoid of any trustworthy account of history that does not devolve into an imperial “con,” it is, finally, fantasy, arousal, the heady Story that redeems the perversions of Western occupation. Sunset Oasis is a call to arms: compelling, complex and deeply mesmerizing.

Reviewed by Karen Luscombe
The Globe and Mail 11 January 2010