Bahaa Taher: Family Feud

This brief novel comes packaged in three pages of acknowledgments, a note on transliteration and pronunciation of Arabic, a glossary and 15 pages of introduction. By the time you reach the first words by the author, you do feel rather as if you were contemplating a museum exhibit cocooned by curatorial explanation. The most useful part of this freight is the introduction, which sets the scene for a piece of fiction that is frequently allusive and the context of which could be mysterious to those unfamiliar with the social and political background of modern Egypt.

Bahaa Taher has published three novels and several collections of short stories, but "Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery," his most recent novel, is the first to appear in English, in a translation by Barbara Romaine. He is of a slightly younger generation than Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, but, like Mr. Mahfouz, he is an outspoken commentator on contemporary life, and so, equally, has suffered censorship and professional obstruction. Indeed, he now lives in Geneva. He was young in the heady post-revolutionary days of the late 1950's and 60's, and his fiction has expressed the bewilderment and disillusion of people who did not see the fulfillment they anticipated in terms of reforms and political freedom.

This particular novel, though, is less about disillusion than about the conflicts and confusion within traditional Egyptian life at a time of accelerated change. It is set 30 years ago in a village outside Luxor, the area Mr. Taher's parents came from. At the end of the book the narrator, a boy at the time of the events recalled, looks back almost nostalgically at that period before there was electricity in the villages, when no one ever came to or went from such a community and every person was related to everyone else. Now his family has dispersed, he lives in Cairo and the climate of his childhood seems distant.

There the nostalgia runs out. For this is a dramatic and horrifying story, quite at odds with the expectations aroused by the perky title. Safiyya, the narrator's aunt, is an orphan girl who was taken in by his parents and brought up by them. It is taken for granted that in the fullness of time she will marry Harbi, a handsome and agreeable young relative. To the consternation of all, when she is 16 the local bey -- a man in his 60's, of wealth and prestige -- asks to marry her. Safiyya acquiesces, still in thrall to the traditional role of the Egyptian woman. She becomes a doting and submissive wife and bears the bey a son. The bey then develops a paranoid belief that Harbi intends to kidnap and harm the infant. He brings hired thugs to the village to torture Harbi appallingly. Harbi manages to break free and shoot the bey. The scene is now set for one of the blood feuds that are the background to traditional village life, for Safiyya must raise her son in the expectation that he will in due course avenge his father by killing Harbi.

Safiyya and Harbi are both victims. Safiyya's life is ruined by her savage obsession with revenge, Harbi's by the primitive brutality of the bey. He returns eventually, after many years of imprisonment and hard labor, and is given sanctuary by the monks of the Coptic monastery near the village. This connection then becomes the second theme of the novel, running parallel to the narrative of persecution and revenge. For the two progressive figures in the story, the narrator's father and an old monk, Bishai, join forces -- Muslim and Christian -- to protect Harbi and to oppose the ancient practice of feud and bloodshed.

This is a significant alliance at a time of uneasy relations between Egyptian Copts and Muslims and gives the novel a political relevance. But the entirely personal and private flavor of it takes its strength from the vignettes of the main characters -- the half-crazed Safiyya, the soberly liberal-minded father, the principled old priest. Simply told, without adornment or much authorial intrusion, this is a brief tragedy with resonances wider than its village setting.

By Penelope Lively, The New York Times
Published: Sunday, June 30, 1996