Bahaa Taher: What happened to us?

When Bahaa Taher releases a new novel, intellectuals in Egypt and across the Arab world sit up and pay attention. It is an event, something to mark, because Taher, despite his reputation as one of the country’s most important novelists, ranking up there with Naguib Mahfouz and Youssef Idriss, has only written 10 books. His compact bibliography includes short story collections, novels and works of non-fiction.

It is as a novelist that critics and readers refer to Taher. They know it is quality, and not quantity, that matters the most when it comes to this superb writer. “If I knew how to write a new novel every six months, I would,” the soft-spoken scribe offers with a smile, sitting across the table from me at his favorite haunt, the Diwan bookshop.

His latest novel, Wahet El-Ghuroub (Dusk Oasis), came out last November and has generated a lot of interest among Arab and Egyptian media. Set in Siwa during the end of the nineteenth century, it draws parallels between the dilemmas of the Egyptian intellectual coming out of the Orabi revolution and those of the Egyptian intellectual coming out of the 1952 revolution — the era of Taher’s youth.

Taher does not care that his bibliography is short. He was busy doing equally important things, he explains. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Egyptian Radio’s cultural program, which Taher helped to develop. He joined the fledgling broadcaster when he was fresh out of college, where he studied literature and was a member of the literary society that gave birth to Egypt’s most notable critics and writers.

“We embarked on the greatest and most enjoyable cultural adventure, consumed by the idea of building a new cultural program and new media forms to represent the literature, theater and poetry of the time. This swallowed up a lot of the time dedicated to writing. But I do not regret it in the least. On the contrary: I believe [the experience] enriched me. It helped me commune with the most significant cultural figures of the time, like Youssef Idriss, Naguib Mahfouz, Salah Abdel-Sabour, Ahmed Abdel-Moati Hegazy, Naguib Sorour and others. It was consuming, but very exciting because we were making something out of nothing. Material gain was not our aim. We worked late past midnight for the sake of work itself,” he says.

That spirit was everywhere at the time, he recalls. “I remember the story of an engineer working on the High Dam. He had to end his work for the day so a new shift would take over. But he did not want to stop, he was in tears as he begged his boss to let him keep working,” he says.

So what happened to us?

“This is a very big question,” he starts. “To answer it, you must go back to the history of the era. Galal Amin [the renowned AUC economics professor] asks the question, ‘What ever happened to the Egyptians?’ Things have happened. These include the loss of the dream. We dreamt of doing something new. This was true about literature, economics, politics and society. These were very big dreams. You could not help but be excited about this project that existed then. But it is finished today, for one reason or another. 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.”

The loss of a common project, a common dream, has led to the disintegration of society, Taher believes. “In our society, it is not possible to succeed as an individual. We do not have the Wild West to conquer and bring back gold from. We are a country [that] has always worked. Our success is built on the basis of work. If the ancient Egyptian farmer had not opened canals and waterways, we would have never amounted to anything.”

Taher believes it all ended with Sadat’s open-door policies. “I left the country at the time. We stopped challenging the external conditions, so the Egyptian project disappeared. We are failures today Our constitution has done away with everything. These people [the Egyptian upper-crust] are blind to the basics of our societal make-up. They are like the sailors from that famous Sinbad story who were shipwrecked and lived on a rich and magnificent island. Suddenly, the island started to sink because it was not an island. They were living on the back of a whale. This is where they [the ruling classes] are today. You can see the general dissatisfaction, despair and depression everywhere. People feel that the life they dream of does not exist. Never mind the demonstrations, the workers’ and judges’ movements; we are seeing the manifestations of a much more dangerous disease,” Taher says.

In 1975, the dissident author was systematically driven out of the country. “The minister of information issued a decision to suspend me and to ban me from writing anywhere in Egypt. I tried to make a living here, but I could not. I had no source of income. The only thing available to me at the time was translation, so I traveled from country to country doing that. I went to India, Sri Lanka, Senegal, Kenya and other countries seeking work,” he remembers.

Taher was not alone in his predicament. But unlike him, other writers moved to Arab countries and wrote for Arab publications. “I never liked to do this. If my country does not recognize me, becoming a star in other countries does not please me. Maybe I am sentimental. I am an Arab nationalist, but other [Arab] regimes were not much better than Egypt’s. All of these countries had worse conditions in terms of freedoms. I had less faith in them than I did in the Egyptian regime, and I still do not see much good in these Arab regimes. I believe in Pan-Arabism, but not in Arab leaders,” he says with a laugh.

Taher professes he is one of the few who still believe in the notion. “Everybody says [Pan-Arabism is dead] and the media likes to highlight the side that says ‘we have nothing to do with Arabs,’ or ‘Egypt first.’ But when an Arab crisis comes up, the Egyptian people become an Arab people.”

In 1981, Taher finally found a surrogate home in Geneva, where he worked as a United Nations translator. “My life before was very tough. I felt really miserable and I could not write. And for two years after going to Geneva, I could not write either. I had works that were yet unpublished. It was really difficult to get published at the time. I gave my novel Sharq El-Nakheel [East of the Palms] to Louis Greiss, who was the editor-in-chief of Sabah El-Kheir newspaper back then. He told me he was willing to publish one installment of the novel and would stop publishing it if he faced any objections. That was in 1983. He published it, and nobody objected. That was the beginning, the time when the chains were first broken,” he recalls.

And in 1991 came Khalti Safeyya wal Deir (Aunt Safeyya and the Monastery), one of the author’s most celebrated novels. Translated into 10 languages, the story is set in Upper Egypt, and was the first novel to handle the relationship between Copts and Muslims. The desperate love Harby felt toward Safeyya, who is one of the strongest women in Arab literature, was one of the elements that made the New York Times Book Review compare it to a Greek tragedy — presumably unaware that Upper Egyptian lore holds the most flaming and tragic love stories ever told.

The Cairo-born Upper Egyptian writer remembers the fountain of his stories: “Most of the Upper Egyptian stories were told to me by my mother. She was my Upper Egypt. She left the village at the age of 16, and lived in Cairo until she was quite advanced in years, but it was as if she never left the village. All her stories, interests and dialect were the stories of the village of her birth. She was clinging tight to her roots. Like every Upper Egyptian house in Cairo, our home was the destination of visiting relatives coming to Cairo for whatever purpose. My mother waited for these visits to listen to the latest gossip from the village, so I knew the stories that went on there, albeit indirectly.”

Khalti Safeyya broke one of the taboos of literature by openly discussing Coptic-Muslim relations in Upper Egypt. But why is it a taboo? “It is a very sensitive issue. I was very careful while writing the novel, and tried to be completely objective in handling issues. I wrote what I knew, that we [Copts and Muslims] loved each other and had no problems. I tried not to be biased to any party, yet I still managed to anger some Muslims and some Christians. I still do not know what angered them,” he says.

Another novel that created quite a stir was El-Hobb fil Manfa (Love In Exile), because it delved into the Israeli massacre (aided by the Maronite Lebanese Phalanges militias) of thousands of Palestinian civilians in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. It also handled the theme of East-West relationships — which, according to critics, is a recurring motif in Taher’s work. “A lot of people see this and analyze it. But it is not something that is on my mind all the time. What is on my mind, though, are the universal human issues which are to be found in the East and the West. People have studied and written about the East-West relationship in Qalat Doha [Doha Said] and Bil Ams Halimtu Bicki [Yesterday, I Dreamt of You, a short story collection]. To each his own. But what I care about is the unity and not the diversity, the universality of concerns, the universality of pain,” he says.

Love in Exile was translated into English, something that at first worried the publishers. Any mention of a massacre by Israelis is often branded as anti-Semitism in the West, but there was no stir caused. “A translation falls into a well of silence. They are mostly published by small publishing houses that do not have the means to publicize them. Khalti Safeyya was different because the NYT wrote about it, but it did not make a great difference because it was published by California University Press, a small house,” Taher explains.

So if a writer wants to gain fame abroad, “The alternative is to respond to the expectations of the Western reader, who wants to read about the exotic East, and about the discrimination against women. They want to hear that the regimes are dictatorial, and that there are fierce problems between minorities. Khalti Safeyya said that things are not that bad, and this is something they do not want to hear. The BBC interviewed me about it, and the anchor kept interjecting, ‘Surely things are not really as you describe them.’ At the end I told her it is your testimony against mine. Go back to what Lucy Duff Gordon wrote, and she was a visitor to the area I write about. If I write a novel about [discrimination], it will become a best-seller tomorrow,” he says.

What is going on, Taher points out, is methodical demonizing of Arabs. The only solution “is to become strong again, as a society. It is only then that the world will listen to us. So long as we are weak, they will be happy to read about us as weak people who keep women in the harem, as terrorists and perpetrators of discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities.”

Siwa, where Taher’s latest novel takes place, is a location rarely used in Egyptian literature. “Like I say in the introduction to the novel, what drew me to Siwa was Mahmoud Azmi, the maamour (police chief) of Siwa who blew up the temple of Omm Obeida in 1897. I tried to understand why he did what he did, and I discovered that, judging by his age, he must have lived through the Orabi revolution, and must have been affected by it. This is the event I built the story around, which is why I say that the real Mahmoud Azmi is not in the book,” he says.

The book is a series of first-person accounts by the characters of the book, most importantly Mahmoud Abdel-Zaher; his Irish wife Catherine; Sheikh Saber, one of the Siwan tribal Sheikhs; Sheikh Yehia, the enlightened leader/healer; and Alexander the Great, whose temple in Siwa is one of the main elements of the book.

“Themes are the basic units of this novel. Alexander the Great is one of the most important themes in the book, because when he speaks, he acts like a mirror, he clarifies a lot of things. Some people could not see this, and wrote that Alexander was unnecessary. They said his presence broke the storyline. But when I write a novel, I am not writing a story. A novel is a complex world. In my book, Fi Madih El-Riwaya [In Praise of the Novel], I say that a novel represents a vision of the world; it is the novelist’s vision of the individual, society and the metaphysical questions a human asks. This is what great novels do. Other novels, on the other hand, are read for entertainment. True readers do not expect their writer to tell them a story,” Taher states.

The angry and defeated Mahmoud is a symbol for the Arab intellectual, or so critics say. “I will not object to this [hypothesis]. I will not say no. He probably expresses the frustrations of the Arab intellectual over the span of two centuries. The generation of the 1952 revolution is going through the same anger as Mahmoud, but I hope they will not express their anger the way he did his,” he says.

Catherine, on the other hand, is the symbol for the disdainful Orientalist. “She is full of contradictions. She says that her father taught her to love the East, but not the people of the East. She is patronizing toward Egyptians, which is how many Westerners view the East. But let’s not wallow in self-pity. They view all of the Third World this way.”

Through the novel Taher brings up the hope that by becoming strong, we can change things. “In the past, when I traveled abroad during Nasser’s time, the customs officials looked at my passport with anger, hatred and a lot of respect,” he says. Today, people have lost this self-respect. As a result, Taher explains, it is impossible for a true rebel to come out from our midst.

The character Malika is the perfect rebel. Unlike the other characters, she does not speak, but we hear about her in other characters’ accounts. “To me, she was like a dream. You do not delve deeply into a dream. It is like a glimmer. If she had turned into a fully developed character, she would have lost her dreamlike quality, this allusion to a paradise lost. Some people wanted to read more about her, but I decided to keep her a dream, because a dream is never complete,” Taher explains.

Is Malika the rebel of the new century, a symbol of the youths of today? Taher believes this is not the case, but wishes it was. “Youths [today] are rebelling in the wrong direction. They love death, rather than life. Malika loved life. She wanted to live, she wanted to make beautiful things — statues, she wanted to connect with the world, and rebelled against useless old customs. Is this the spirit of today’s youth? No, it is not. But this was the rebellion of our generation. We rebelled against everything old, against the rigid heritage. We were full of dreams, we wanted to build a new world. The youths I meet are more interested in the afterlife than they are in life. Malika was different, and so she died.”

By Manal el-Jesri
Egypt Today, June 2007