Bahaa Taher: Of Hope and Remembrance

We kill our poets with silence and we kill them with forgetfulness. If it is true that poets are the nation's conscience, what is the fate of a nation that forgets its poets?

Love in Exile, Bahaa Taher

Bahaa Taher is frequently described as ‘the elder statesman’ of contemporary Arabic literature. One of the most widely-read novelists in the Arab world, he is a captivating story-teller, appreciated for the precision and economy of his writing.  With four of his six critically-acclaimed novels translated into English (and several other languages) Taher’s work is now reaching an international audience. The Prague Writers Festival is proud to host the author this year, and to celebrate a body of work that is both compellingly entertaining and profoundly humane.

Taher’s central theme is the rapport between the state and culture, the struggle for a creative force to be recognized and empowered. The work of artists, writers and thinkers reflect society’s inner life, the strengths and weaknesses that define a collective character. In Egypt, where state interference in artistic activity ranges from the subtle to the brutally manipulative, the creative voice has been threatened with extinction, and with it, the values of a culture renowned for its longevity and ability to survive against the odds. Emerson remarked that ‘there is no history, only biography’. Taher’s writing may be understood as the biography of a people immersed in contradiction. In his work, Egypt represents humanity in microcosm.

‘I have always thought that you cannot separate politics from fiction,’ Taher remarks. ‘It is important to combine what is happening to ordinary people because what happens in the political field affects everyone. ‘

As a student, Taher believed in the principles behind the 1952 Officers Revolution, which put an end to the 72-year-long British occupation and the royal status of the 150-year-old Mohammed Ali dynasty. Egypt’s first elected president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, infused the public with prideful enthusiasm: ‘Everything they have stolen from us, we will take back!’ he told an exultant crowd on the day he nationalized the Suez Canal.

But Nasser’s regime failed to deliver on its promises of social equity and civil rights. ‘I still believe it was a good period’ says Taher, ‘in the sense that we had a vision of a country that was self-sufficient, independent and progressive. That’s the Egypt I lived in when I was young, and the Egypt I think was on the right track.’

As the state cracked down on workers’ unions and took censorious control of the nation’s press, ‘I saw the vision dwindling’ Taher recalls, underlining that the revolution’s greatest short-coming was its failure to encourage people to take part in democratic change. ‘People were divided, not united, which made it easier for the subsequent regime to abolish both the good and bad of the revolution.’

Under Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, the state was further isolated from the people and their needs, as programs aimed at industrial and agricultural development were abandoned in favor of an ‘open door policy’, a simulacrum of western capitalism, the awarding of key enterprises to private sector cronies and foreign interests.  Sadat, like Nasser, did not take kindly to critique. The persecution of opposition intellectuals that began under Nasser and enthusiastically pursued by Sadat, was designed to eliminate any manifestation of culture that failed to promote the state’s chosen course.

In 1975, Taher lost his job as director of cultural programming for Cairo Radio, and his writing was banned from publication. ‘I was a victim [of Sadat’s regime] and at the time, very angry’, he says. ‘Now I can look back and say I understand Sadat. He had an idea. He believed that if he gave America all that it wanted from Egypt it might solve our problems. He believed that 99 percent of the cards [for regional peace and prosperity] were in America’s hands. But he was wrong. I thought and I still think that ‘the cards’ are in the hands of the people, in the hands of average Egyptians.’

Denied his source of livelihood, Taher moved to Switzerland, serving the United Nations as translator for nearly twenty years.  While abroad, he followed Egyptian affairs closely, noting the growing gap between rich and poor, Muslim and Christian. ‘My father, who studied at Al-Azhar University and was religious man, used to take me as a boy to visit his Christian friends at Christmas and other feast days to wish them well—and this was the normal thing to do. In those days we never cared to what religion our neighbors belonged, and never dreamt of questioning such differences.’

In response to insidious sectarianism, Taher wrote My Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery (1991), a tight yet lyrical novel evoking the tolerant Egypt of his youth. Set in a village in Upper Egypt, the drama revolves around a young Muslim who has killed a man in self-defense and is offered sanctuary in a Christian Monastery. The book, which illustrated a defining—and vanishing—feature of Egyptian society—the peaceful co-existence of people of different faiths and backgrounds—was part homage, part admonishment of the dangers of divisiveness.

Taher’s next publication was Love in Exile (1995) a ‘contemplation of what went wrong and what was wrong from the very beginning’. The novel’s protagonist is an exiled journalist coming to terms with the Israeli occupation of Lebanon and questioning his feelings for an Austrian woman, who cannot fathom his sense of humiliation and anger. Love in Exile echoes the disappointment of a people whose hopes for peaceful and meaningful lives are undermined by powers beyond their reach.

Taher returned to Egypt in the late 1990s to find ‘a different Egypt from the one I left, and very different people. I discovered that in Egypt—like everywhere else—economic forces had changed the character of the individual and society’s principles in an irreversible way’. Taher refers to the growing presence at that time of foreign investment in Egypt and above all, a new consumerism that ignited desires for things most people could not afford.

His novel The Point of Light (2000) was an attempt to understand why such change had taken place. Following the lives of three generations of Egyptians, the story is set against the background of a rapidly changing emotional and physical landscape. A man’s home in an old quarter of Cairo is about to be demolished. His son is anxious to sell the land for profit, but the father wishes to preserve his family’s homestead and history. The man’s grandson represents ‘the point of light’ a new generation that may strike a balance between the old and new.

When asked if he still feels that youth holds the key to a better Egypt, Taher offers a fervent: ‘I hope.’ His wishes for the future are tempered with realistic fears. The country’s educational system has long been sub-standard and college graduates form a significant portion of the unemployed. The so-called Emergency Law, in place since Sadat’s 1981 assassination, denies citizens their right to due process, forbids public gatherings (including peaceful demonstrations) and has strengthened the power of the state security apparatus beyond all reasonable bounds.

In 2004, Taher helped found the ‘Egyptian Movement for Change’ a group of intellectuals and opposition party members who demanded an end to the Emergency Law and to President Hosni Mubarak’s then 24-year-old regime. The group (whose motto and unofficial name is Kifayya, Arabic for ‘enough’) called for ‘a national cry against the status quo’ through demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience. The movement hoped to convince average Egyptians ‘to put away their fears, and demand their political and economic rights’, in the words of a group spokesman and editor for a prominent opposition newspaper.

Now 75 years old, Taher recently withdrew from Kifayya to concentrate on writing. ‘I took part in all the demonstrations and got beaten up like everyone else’ he says. ‘While we were demonstrating, and being harassed by the police, I noticed the passers-by looking at us very curiously, with not slightest idea of joining us even though we were supposedly there to demand our civil rights. I asked myself, what’s wrong? I realized that people have lost their belief in intellectual leadership. Yet unless average citizens become involved, the movement of a minority elite will lead to nothing.’

‘I’m a retired rebel’ Taher quips, ‘but I haven’t stopped. I’m still doing what I can.’

Currently at work on his seventh novel, Bahaa Taher’s books are attracting adulation at home and abroad. In 1998, he was given Egypt’s State Award of Merit in Literature, the highest honor the Egyptian establishment can confer on a writer. In 2000, he was awarded the prestigious Italian Giuseppe Acerbi Prize for My Aunt Safiya and the Monastery, which was also made into a television serial popular throughout the Arab world. In 2008, his novel Sunset Oasis, set in Siwa in Egypt’s western desert and spanning several epochs of Egyptian history, won the Arab Booker Prize for fiction, and is currently on the long list for The Independent  (UK) Foreign Fiction Awards. His fifth collection of short stories I Did Not Know Peacocks Could Fly, published only several months ago, has already run to a third (Arabic) edition.

Today there are signs that the basic attitude of the state towards culture has shifted from trying to control all that’s published to realizing this isn’t possible, especially thanks to the internet. In a country with illiteracy rates of some 50 percent, the state’s laxity may also be attributed to the cynical belief that half the population can’t read anyway. Yet, Egypt’s reading and writing public is growing demonstrably, partly in response to the prestige of authors like Mahfouz and Taher.

According to Humphrey Davies, who translated Sunset Oasis, as well as a number of award-winning Arab authors, including Alaa al-Aswany (The Yacoubian Building) and Elias Khoury (Gate of the Sun), ‘More (Arabic) books are being translated into other languages than ever before—many of them new works written by an interesting new generation of authors throughout the Arab world.’ Davies likewise cites the establishment of a number of small risk-taking publishing houses in recent years. ‘You’d wonder how, with plummeting education standards and political sterility, literature can flourish. Yet perhaps it’s precisely for this reason, it’s is a channel for creativity that people need and want.’

Davies is not the only commentator to speak of ‘a period of florescence in Arab literature’. If there is ‘a point of light’ on Egypt’s horizon, it is this:

Bahaa Taher will appear at the Prague Writers’ Festival in June.

When asked why he abandoned the relative comfort of Switzerland to return to Egypt, Taher says:  ‘You see this place?—with all its faults and problems? I can’t leave it.’

Maria Golia, for the Prague Writers´ Festival
Cairo, April 2010