This Blinding Absence of Light

"My eyes looked like those of madman, although I haven't lost my mind.  There was also death in my eyes, yet I am alive. I have not accepted having those eyes, there's something frightful in them. ... I'm afraid. And I see fear in the eyes of others.  Maybe I should have prepared myself for that shock. I'll get used to it, in the end."

Cette aveuglante absence de lumière, by Tahar Ben Jelloun

In the 1970's, the Polisario (Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el Hamra and Rio de Oro) was founded in the Western Sahara to fight for independence from France.  In 1975, although the International Court of Justice upheld the claim of the native Saharawi people to self-determination, King Hassan II of Morocco organized the so-called "Green March" to recover what was then called the Spanish Sahara from Polisario forces.  Faced with an enormous invading army, Spain, which had been asked to intervene, sued for peace, and the resulting Madrid Agreement divided the disputed territory between Morocco and Mauritania.  The Polisario movement established a government-in-exile in Algeria (Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic), but the region--as empty and barren as any on earth (with a population of one-half million)--is still governed by Morocco. 

This Blinding Absence of Light is the story--a monologue, a parlay with madness--of Salim, a Moroccan soldier kept for eighteen years at Tazmamart Prison, a literal hellhole, an underground cell into which no light could penetrate, a coffin ten feet long by five feet wide, so cramped that the fifty-eight inmates, each kept in solitary confinement, couldn't stand. Here Salim and his fellow prisoners were kept (barely) alive on starvation rations for nearly two decades until 1991 when twenty-eight survivors were finally freed. 

"For a long time I searched for the black stone that cleanses the soul of death. When I say a long time, I think of a bottomless pit, a tunnel dug with my fingers, my teeth, in the stubborn hope of glimpsing, if only for a minute, one infinitely lingering minute, a ray of light, a spark that would imprint itself deep within my eye, that would stay protected in my entrails like a secret."

To call this novel claustrophobic is an understatement--there are voices, but aside from the initial description of the prison cell, with its hole in the floor for excreting and its tiny hole in the ceiling for breathing, there is nothing to look at and no light with which to see, and only the surreally calm words of the narrator to listen to, words whose cadences are incantatory, as if Salim were reading the Qur'an and not narrating the tale of his unimaginable imprisonment. He is, as he says himself, a dead man. In the final chapters, describing his release, Salim speaks of being reborn: his eyes are unfocused, his body is stooped, his teeth are gone, and he cannot walk--the world has moved on, and he sits with his dying mother as Lazarus, come to proclaim not man's resurrection but his inhumanity to his fellow man. 

I've read my share of prison stories: Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle made an indelible impression on me many years ago; Cheever's Falconer, which might be his finest novel, Darkness at Noon with its expose of the Stalin show trials--however, I prefer true stories of incarceration, books like Wilde's De Profundis and the great Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, raw and honest books that deal with injustice, a genre that goes back at least to Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. 

But to call Jelloun's fictionalization of Salim's two decades in Tazmamart "prison literature" is like calling Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon a travel guide.  This Blinding Absence of Light is a psychological study of a human being in extremis--it asks us to consider not only what a person can endure (and not in a voyeuristic way--the distance between the reader and Salim is too great), but to consider the egregious suffering one man--in this case King Hassan II--can inflict on another.  The men interned at Tazmamart were never accused of a crime, never tried or convicted.  I won't compare their plight to that of the men at Guantanamo since comparisons of suffering are glib and misleading; yet in reading TBAOL one is forced to consider the consequences of long-term incarceration, especially absent any substantive legal process, on both inmates and their jailers. (In TBAOL the guards are as dehumanized as their charges).  The reader is forced to confront both the injustice as well as the horror of Salim's fate as the 6000 plus days of his sentence unfold. What could time have meant?  How could one have lived one day under these conditions?  Only the "blessing" of being allowed an hour above ground to bury the dead marked the eons of Salim's (literal) internment. 

Tahar Ben Jelloun was born in Fes, in French Morocco, in 1944.  He received the bilingual, French-Arabic education typical of the colonial period (actually, that's not true: most often the education would be only in the metropolitan power's language, at least until independence).  Jelloun was a teacher of philosophy in Casablanca before moving to Paris in 1971.  He won the Prix Goncourt in 1987 for his novel La Nuit Sacrée and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for This Blinding Absence of Light. He has recently published a controversial account of the "Arab Spring," entitled The Spark.

For further information see Maureen Freely, here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jul/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview14

This Blinding Absence of Light, trans. by Linda Coverdale, is published by the New Press.

George Ovitt (5/18/13)

Hafiz: Tongue of the Invisible

A Year With Hafiz: Daily Contemplations, selected by Daniel Ladinsky

“He fears nothing,” wrote Emerson of the Sufi poet, Shams-ud-din Muhammad (c.1320-1389), known commonly as Hafiz or ‘memorizer,’ an honorific conferred upon him, as a young man, by his having memorized the Quran. “He sees too far, he sees throughout; such is the only man I wish to see or be.” Beloved by Persians, by Muslims and mystics, Hafiz, a contemporary of Chaucer, has long been revered in the West—thanks in large part to Goethe—by such diverse figures as Nietzsche, Brahms, Queen Victoria, Garcia Lorca, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes was fond of quoting the poet’s ghazals. Born in the city of Shiraz, the son of a coal merchant, Hafiz worked as a baker’s assistant and later studied calligraphy and the work of the Persian master poets, poets such as Saadi of Shiraz, Farid-ud-din Attar, and Jalal-ud-din-Rumi.  While still a young man, he became a disciple of a Sufi teacher named Muhammad Attar, an experience that transformed his understanding of the world—of Love, of Beauty: of God.

 “The Sufis,” according to Robert Graves from his introduction to Idries Shah’s fascinating book The Sufis, “are an ancient spiritual freemasonry whose origins have never been traced or dated… Though commonly mistaken for a Moslem sect, the Sufis are at home in all religions,” independent of clergy and dogma, an ancient mystical tradition with “an intense, often ecstatic, one-pointed devotion to God.”*

Since the latter was not of interest to me, I wondered—for recently a student had given me a copy of A Year With Hafiz as a gift—if I would find anything in his poetry at all. What I discovered was the vision of a compassionate, profoundly catholic man whose gentle, self-effacing wisdom reminds me of that of such fellow greats as Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Thomas Merton, Krishnamurti, Meher Baba, and the fourteenth  and current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyasto. Missing from the many poems I read, and perhaps from Sufism itself, for all its association with Islam, is any notion of sin or damnation, any fear of God. Instead, what distinguishes these devotional love songs is Hafiz’s simple joie de vivre, an abundance of delight, intelligence, and humor that bubbles forth like water from a cool mountain spring.  The pleasure of these poems for me lies in their refreshing, truly novel combination of “ecstatic assurance and scepticism”—enough to drive both rationalists and zealots mad.

Retire In The Alps

The great religions are the ships,

poets the lifeboats.

Every sane person I know has

jumped overboard!

Hafiz, it is good for business,

isn’t it?  Indeed,

but I would rather retire in the Alps!

I Had a Legitimate Excuse

I had a legitimate excuse for not going to the

mosque and temple to pray.

It was because love is so wild in me I might

break the fragile glass cage that all religions

are made of.

Two Giant Fat People

God and I have become like two giant

fat people living in a tiny boat;

we keep bumping into each other and

                                  l

                                  a

                                  u

                                  g

                                  h

                                  i

                                  n

                                  g

                                   .

Hafiz (1310-1390)lies buried in Musalla Gardens in Shiraz.

*“The Life and Work of Hafiz” by Henry S. Mindlin

* “ecstatic assurance and scepticism” from Claud Field’s Preface to The Alchemy of Happiness by Al-Ghazzi

Note: Hafiz poem in Arabic called “My 3,ooo Loving Arms”

Special thanks to my friend and former student, the poet, Megan Reynolds, for the gift of this book.

Peter Adam Nash

A Walker in Mexico City

And Let the Earth Tremble At Its Centers, by Gonzalo Celorio

"He couldn't remember anything that happened the night before."

I confess a weakness for what might be called dipsomaniacal novels--books whose plots revolve around the excessive consumption of alcohol.  Great dipsomaniacal novels include Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes, John O'Brien's Leaving Las Vegas (which also fits into another category, that of novels whose film adaptation is actually better than the book--a rare class indeed), Lawrence Block's sublime Matt Scudder novels, Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, Ironweed by William Kennedy...you get the idea. And my favorite,  the book most relevant to Celorio's brilliant novel, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.  The great virtue of novels whose narrator drinks too much is the narrator's honesty--that's the reason these books are so powerful--drunks might be deluded about themselves--that goes with the territory--but they don't hesitate to speak the truth about the world around them.  I'll never forget reading Lowry for the first time and being shocked at the extent to which his story of the final day in the life of the self-destructive Geoffrey Firmin (the "Consul") put me inside a man bent upon the eradication of his being --Lowry's gift for poetically rendering a self-destructive consciousness was unique, and  Lowry's prose was nearly hallucinatory, as if (as if!) he were writing in a state of morbid inebriation himself.  Compared to Lowry, Bukowski was a member of the Moral Majority. 

So: booze and books go well together--and I don't mean writers who like booze; hell, there's no end to that subject--no, I mean books where drinking is an integral part of the character's life, where it shapes his or her reflections on the world.

The other category of fiction to which I am hopelessly addicted is the perambulatory novel--the novel whose plot is focused on the ramblings of a thoughtful person, usually through an urban landscape.  I emphasize "urban" here; I have little  interest in books about people walking in the woods, even the inimitable Bill Bryson, or books that describe botanizing strolls in the country except if the country carries the narrator to an especially blighted landscape (as in Sebald's brilliant Rings of Saturn).  No, walks should be taken in cities, where there is something to see and be stimulated by--I'm no naturalist, and though I often hike in the woods, my thoughts among trees are banal--"Why is there always a fly buzzing around my face?"--whereas a walk in Paris or Tokyo or Lisbon or Manhattan or (best of all) Philadelphia is bound to evoke ideas about the human condition, history, late capitalism, and the best place to get a drink.  The city, after all, is humanity's greatest cultural achievement. I love thoughtful walkers like Sebald and Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin; Mrs. Dalloway, Leopold Bloom, Jane Austen's claustrophobic heroines (Catherine, Elizabeth, Marianne), and Farnsworth, hero of Joshua Ferris's remarkable The Unnamed, Alfred Kazin (A Walker in the City, a book that made Brownsville as fascinating as Joyce's Dublin)--these are the sorts of walkers I like to carry in my knapsack while lounging in Central Park.

Given these odd fictional interests, Gonzalo Celorio's And Let the Earth Tremble at Its Centers (the words are from the Mexican national anthem) was just the book for me.  Celorio describes one day (the final one, as it transpires) in the life of an older academic, Dr. Juan Manuel Barrientos, a man who loves to wander the streets of Mexico City, who is intimate with the city's architectural history, the stories behind each façade, intimate with every café and bar, and a lover of drink--not, perhaps, an alcoholic, but one of those ritual imbibers whose rules about when and where to have beer, tequila, scotch, and/or wine, reflect a conscious admission that life on the cusp of inebriation offers charms that sobriety does not:

"Once and for all, you're ready to take the second shot of tequila of the day--the one that produces happiness and euphoria, according to your theoretical disquisitions. Impulsively, you're about to order another one, which will send straight to hell the rules of the game that you yourself imposed on your students [college aged, disciples of Dr. Barrientos]."

Drinking and walking, Dr. Barrientos alternates between thoughts of his students--especially his close followers, those whose admiration gives him a reason to live--and thoughts of his childhood, of his parents and his life in the city that he loves.  Just as Mexico City is a modern metropolis built literally on the bones of the past, so is Barrientos' inner life a kind of archaeological dig--his reflections tip seamlessly into bouts of reminiscence and of regret, not only for the life that is fleeting past, but for the life of a great city that is, even as he walks its streets, being destroyed by political and economic forces Barrientos cannot comprehend.  The air of the novel is polluted with sadness and the sense of loss.

And then, of course, there is tequila, a drink that, like mescal in Under the Volcano, promises ease, tranquility, escape from loneliness, and, as it transpires, death. 

Dr. Juan Manuel Barrientos, like Lowry's Consul, is a man enamored with self-annihilation.  In Mexico, los borrachazos are serious about their drunkenness.  Barrientos is a thoughtful drinker, but as the climactic scenes of the novel make clear, he too has a Baroque-Catholic fondness for the distinguished thing.  Lowry's and Celorio's heroes (like Greene's 'whiskey priest') aren't British clubmen sipping gin and quinine in some African enclave, or Irishmen downing what is a rather salubrious mixture of barley and hops, or Frenchmen breaking up clots of butterfat with glorious Bordeaux's; no, Barrientos comes from a long line of imbibers of those ferocious spirits brewed from plants that are themselves unforgiving, harvested in the harshest country in the hemisphere. Dia de los muertos indeed.

Barrientos' brief odyssey through the bars of Cinco de Mayo and Avenida Moneda ends ingloriously to be sure, in violence and humiliation, but there is a humanity at the heart of Celorio's story that is lacking in the more calculated and depressing tale of Geoffrey Firman.  The well-intentioned, vain, and befuddled Professor stumbles into his fate; the Consul embraces his destruction right up to the moment his body is tossed into a ravine.  I'm inclined to think Celorio was influenced by Lowry, but perhaps not.  Novels that take their theme from the landscape of Mexico City are not unusual; in any case the great beauty of both these books is their relentless examination of the memories of their monomaniacal protagonists--both books lack supporting characters, for good reason:

“How many hours of your life have you spent sitting in front

of mirrors at bars, alternating one foot or the other on the
barstool rung, staring at your reflection, rebuffing it at times,
and at other times, doting on it with tenderness? Tell me,
how many hours has it been? If you dared to add them up,
they would become days, weeks, months, and even years.”

 

Gonzalo Celorio, born in Mexico City in 1948, is a critic and essayist as well as a novelist. He is the former director of the Fonda de Cultural Economica.  And Let the Earth Tremble At Its Centers is his first novel to be translated into English, and with great skill, by Dick Geddes.  It was published by the University of Texas Press in their excellent Pan American Literature in Translation Series.

http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/series/series/Texas-Pan-American-Literature-in-Translation-Series

George Ovitt (5/13/13)

What We Talk About When We Talk About Nothing

Spectacle (Stories) by Susan Steinberg

"Steinberg is one of the best fiction writers in America today." Joshua Furst

 

 

 

I was tempted to begin this journal entry with the famous final proposition from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but since no one has any idea what Wittgenstein meant--I certainly don't--I'll quote instead a proposition I flatter myself that I do understand, 6.522 for those of you who are following along at home: "There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical." [Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dis zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische.]  The key word here is Unaussprechliches: my dictionary provides "inexpressible" and also "unutterable" as if these words meant the same thing.  That which cannot be spoken might lie beyond language--the feeling one has for one's children, for example--or it might be the case that we know the proper word for what we are feeling but refuse to utter it because it would be too terrible to do so--I feel this way when a news reporter sticks a microphone in the face of a bereaved husband and asks how he feels now that his (let's imagine) wife has been crushed in a collapsed garment factory.  What he feels is both inexpressible and unutterable.  I don't mean to split hairs here, but the distinction is an important one both for our lives and in our engagement with serious literary works.

 

Raymond Carver was, of course, the most influential of minimalists; indeed, his impact on American literature has been remarkable, if not entirely (in my opinion) positive. It is likely that if you pursue an MFA in fiction writing you will be moved to produce sentences like Ray's sentences, or, as we say, to strive for the Carveresque:

 

"A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house. Except for the chrome hooks, he was an ordinary-looking man of fifty or so.

'How did you lose your hands?' I asked after he'd said what he wanted.

'That's another story," he said. 'You want this picture or not?'" ["Viewfinder"]

 

Not much happens in a classic Carver story; drinks are poured, cigarettes are smoked, conversations tail off into uneasy silences.  When something does happen, as in "Viewfinder," you're hard-pressed to say what exactly and perplexed as to the why. "Gerald Weber didn't have any words left in him. He kept quiet and drove the car." ["The Pheasant"] And so it goes.  But in spite of the silences, there's something going on in Ray's little vignettes of American desperation--there's desperation for one thing, the sense that everything bad that can happen has already happened and we've been invited to witness the aftermath.  When I read Ray I feel like I do when I look at pictures of bombed-out cities. There we are, having a bourbon, sitting in the rubble.

 

Carver's palette is the inexpressible.  But Susan Steinberg goes Ray one better; she  mines the unutterable, not just the things that we are silent about but the things we cannot help but be silent about.  A Carver character is reticent; a Steinberg character is dumb (in the original meaning of the word):

 

"When the plane crashed, I was all messed up.

For years, I was all messed up.

I could see the scene inside the plane.

I could see the scene outside.

And I had thoughts of flying.

Then thoughts of falling. . . . " ["Spectacle"]

 

There are twelve pages of propositions just like these.  There are no characters to speak of, no incidents that we can believe in, no feelings expressed.  All p is q. No p is q. Some p is q.  Reading Spectacle, I thought about my study of symbolic logic, p's and q's that stand for propositions that stand for (as Wittgenstein briefly believed) pictures of the world. I thought of poems that are really prose; I though of prayers chanted in Latin--nonsense, but full of yearning.  Steinberg is doing something in her stories, but what exactly?

 

"Next someone turned up the radio and some song was on, and the six of us were riding up some burned-out Baltimore street. There was no one on the street but us. We were screaming out the words to this song. The another song came on and we knew that song too....I was just so fucking powerful in that moment." ["Superstar"] Well, it isn't Proust, but why should Susan Steinberg write like Proust? 

 

Here is Mr. Joshua Furst on Steinberg's Spectacle:

 

"In each of the stories, we see one or more aspects of how this narrator grapples with the relationship between her circumstances and her ability to control them. And the events presented in the stories reappear with nothing changed but the meaning they hold. The narrator is pressured into pulling the plug on her dying father; her college friend dies in a plane crash. She gets drunk. She has sex with someone she doesn’t like, or someone she does like but pretends not to, or someone she’s pretty sure doesn’t like her."

Fair enough.  But what isn't said here is that we readers don't know if any of these things are really happening--Steinberg purveys ultra-minimalism plus irony!  Is there a plane crash?  Does she kill her father? Has she slept with creeps? The lovely veil of fiction--our willingly suspended disbelief--Steinberg tears it  up with clinical efficiency--she's cataloging events and nothing more; causality is undercut; of course fiction is untrue, but what if it's not only untrue but pointless?

The "narrator"--a droning voice uttering gnomic propositions (see above) isn't only unreliable, she's a phantom, maybe dreaming what she tells the reader, but most certainly not meaning any of it.  Indeed, the word "grapples" in Mr. Furst's review is ludicrous--there is no touching let alone grappling in Spectacle. Steinberg's bursts of prose are feather-light; her detachment is absolute. 

The comparison to Wittgenstein isn't that far-fetched: "Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it--or at least similar thoughts"  In that case....we come to the end, to the futility of writing, of speaking, of feeling. Not the inexpressible or the unutterable, but the banal--not the "things that we pass over in silence" but the things unworthy of expression. What we talk about when there isn't any point in talking.

Untitled, Mark Tobey

 

 

 



Spectacle is published by Graywolf Press https://www.graywolfpress.org/

George Ovitt (5/8/13)

 



 

 



 

 

 

 



Currywurst and War

The Invention of Curried Sausage (Die Entdeckung der Currywurst)

by Uwe Timm

‘Today it is hard to form an even partly adequate idea of the extent of the devastation suffered by the cities of Germany in the last years of the Second World War,” laments Austrian writer W. G. Sebald—certainly no apologist for German atrocities—in a lecture he gave in Zurich called ‘Air War and Literature’, “still harder to think about the horrors involved in that devastation.” Indeed, from the spring of  1942 through the end of the war, the Allied Forces—most notably the English and Americans—carried out a veritable carpet bombing of German cities, destroying military and industrial targets in Hamburg, Cologne, and Wilhelmshaven before the English, under Churchill’s direction, expanded their campaign to include the total destruction of key German cities through the ‘terror bombing’ of their city centers and predominantly civilian populations, a nearly unprecedented tactic (see the German and Italian bombing of Guernica) that included the relentless fire-bombing of Bremen, Darmstadt, Berlin, Dresden, and Hamburg.  By the end of the war, more than two million tons of bombs had fallen on 131 German cities, some 600,00 Germans were dead, and a half a million left homeless. According to Sebald, the destruction was so extensive that “there were 31.1 cubic meters of rubble for every person in Cologne and 42.8 cubic meters for every inhabitant of Dresden.”

It is from out of the ruins of that same Germany that German author Uwe Timm has fashioned his charming and unlikely tale, The Invention of Curried Sausage.  Currywurst, a proletarian snack of sliced pork sausage in a curried tomato sauce,  has been a staple of German fast food since World War II.  As of 2009, it even has its own museum: the Deutsches Currywurst Museum in Berlin, “a sausage shrine dedicated to all things currywurst, including sausage sofas…”* The premise of The Invention of Curried Sausage is simple--and anything but tragic: not convinced that the popular dish was invented in Berlin by the housewife and “rubble woman,” Herta Charlotte Heuwer, on September 4, 1949, when she mixed together catsup, Worcestershire sauce, and some curry powder given her by a British soldier, author/narrator Uwe Timm sets out to track down what he believes are the dish’s true origins in his hometown of Hamburg. There he finds Lena Brücker, a food vendor he knew from childhood, now an old woman living out her final days in a retirement home. Through a series of tea-time visits, Timm patiently endures the old woman’s poignant, if sometimes meandering recollections of the war—some funny, some bittersweet—and finally manages to tease out the details of her miraculous invention.  

Defined by the author as a novella in the original sense of the word, meaning “ a little piece of news,” The Invention of Curried Sausage is more than that.  It is also a story about war and memory, about loneliness and compassion, and about the sometimes magical role of happenstance in life.  

Uwe Timm was born in Hamburg in 1940. He trained to be a furrier and went to college in Braunschweig. He graduated from high school in 1963, and went on to study Philosophy and German Literature in Munich and Paris. He was awarded his doctorate in philosophy in 1971. One of Germany's greatest contemporary writers and novelists, he now works in Munich and Berlin.**  He is perhaps best known in the States for his 1989 novel The Snake Tree. The Invention of Curried Sausage is published by New Directions http://ndbooks.com/ .

* “The Craze Over Currywurst” The Wall Street Journal, August 27^th, 2009

**Bloomsbury Publishing

Peter Adam Nash

"I am a Communist first, a writer after that."

The Committee by Somallah Ibrahim

"Anything that takes us beyond the limits of the conventional novel, now exhausted, is worth doing...."

Writing political fiction tests the limits of a writer's abilities--it is difficult to balance the artfulness of a story with a passionate ideological conviction because the political overshadows the personal in just the way that history mocks our individual hopes and ambitions.  Writers of thrillers make their living by crushing human beings under the weight of events they cannot control--Robert Ludlum's books provide an example--creating stories that focus on their characters' lack of agency and substituting paranoia for any of the deeper emotions that make fiction a source of insight into human lives.  Many political novels allow preaching to overwhelm even the rudimentary conventions of literary art: Atlas Shrugged is the best/worst example (full disclosure: I only managed 250 pages) or Sartre's Les chemins de la liberté trilogy (ditto). Even a gifted writer like Richard Wright can fall into the trap (in Native Son) of allowing the political message to overwhelm his art.  Then there are the well-known dystopias of Huxley, Orwell, or Bulgakov--where the subtleties of fiction are sacrificed to the exploration (and demolition) of a set of political ideas.  And finally there are the many great political novels: The Grapes of Wrath (which I've just been rereading) comes to mind at once, and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, Malraux's Man's Fate,  Penn Warren's All the King's Men, and the novels by writers who have endured Western colonialism--Achebe, Mahfouz, Thiong'o--the list is long and distinguished and everyone will have his or her own favorites.  So: it can be done--novels can convey political ideas forcefully--but navigating the space between art and politics is a difficult one that tests a writer's talent and creativity.

Sonallah Ibrahim's That Smell, self-published in Cairo in 1966, represented a turning point in Egyptian fiction.  This semi-autobiographical novel relates the shock and sorrow encountered by a nameless character (certainly the author himself), just released from prison, as he attempts to re- adapt to ordinary life. That Smell is a raw, unflinching account of alienation and despair; Ibrahim himself spent five years in prison for his communist views, and in his prison notebooks* writes, among other things, of his desire to create fiction that will be capable of transforming Egyptian society: "Can I unify the personal and the objective [the political] in my writing?"  To create this unity has been Ibrahim's artistic task, and the difficulties he encountered are on full display in The Committee, published in Arabic in 1981 (as Al-Lajnah) and in English in 2001.

 

Critics have compared The Committee to the writings of Kafka, or called the book "Kafkaesque," but I can't agree with this comparison.  Kafka is funny; Ibrahim is anything but--indeed, the deadly seriousness of this slender novel reflects the author's desire to add what Hemingway thought of as the "fourth dimension" to fiction--the [politically] symbolic.  The Committee of the novel is the unfeeling and irrational representative of the West, of capitalism, of the colonial oppression of Arabs.  Their manipulation of the narrator feels like the sort of manipulation one finds in a Ludlum novel--a sinister and evil force that compels the hero (a 'man without qualities' or without memory) to take some unspecified actions to save himself from a fate that is unclear and, as in any irrational world, undeserved. 

 



But Kafka's heroes aren't political victims; they suffer from the "existential plight of modern man" (sounds like an undergraduate term-paper title!), not from a political system but from life itself.  Kafka isn't an ideological writer; his subject is the human condition, not political oppression, but the oppressiveness of life itself--which is what makes a book like The Castle so witty; there is no redemption possible in Kafka's fiction, and the forces of absurdity are allied against all of us--permanently. What could be funnier than hopelessness?

In Ibrahim's novel, The Committee demands an interview with an unnamed Egyptian. We can infer that he is well-educated, multi-lingual, possibly a political dissident.  He is to be "examined"--in all senses of the term.  The large, impersonal Committee then assigns the examinee an ambiguous task--to research the life of the most "illustrious" figure in the Arab world.  After some speculation and many dead ends the narrator (whose style of speech and thought is, to put it mildly, laconic) decides to research "the Doctor," an Egyptian Proteus who appears as both benefactor and exploiter of his countrymen, a Machiavellian capitalist and benign socialist, a humanitarian and a ruthless oppressor.  In other words, as the West itself--England for most of Egypt's history, but also France and, in recent decades, the U.S. The narrator discovers in snippets of the popular press, including American celebrity magazines, that the Doctor is not only the most important figure in the Middle East, he is also the unique catalyst for the social and political changes roiling the Arab world.  Everything, in the narrator's view, is connected, and as a Marxist Ibrahim makes a case for the truth of this claim in long speeches to the Committee.  However, the Doctor was not the answer to the Committee's riddle, not, apparently, the luminary and center of political gravity the narrator believed him to be, and, driven to desperation, the narrator commits murder and is condemned to the worst punishment meted out by the Committee--a punishment that makes Kafka's Harrow look like a stroll along the Nile. 

What to make of this odd little book?  I was engrossed by the first fifty pages, then puzzled by the long discourse on Coca-Cola--not by the politics of the narrator's monologues, with which I am in agreement, but on the way in which Ibrahim hoped they would serve the story.  The denouement of The Committee appears implausible--too self-destructive to be believable, but then we know so little about the narrator that motivation isn't a consideration.  The last fifty pages have the quality of a sermon or a political speech and appear to throw over the conventions of story-telling altogether.  Perhaps it is wrong to believe that art can transcend politics--this was not, after all, the view of Marx--but, nonetheless, I believe it.  Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, in particular its third volume, Sugar Street, also makes the case for a leftist interpretation of Egyptian history, but in a far more subtle and persuasive way.

Sunallah Ibrahim was born in Cairo in 1937 and studied Law at Cairo University. He joined the Marxist Democratic Movement for National Liberation while there; during Nasser's crackdown on leftists in the 1950's Ibrahim was arrested and spent the years from 1959-1964 in prison. 

Syracuse University Press has an outstanding list of Middle Eastern fiction, plays and poetry. 
http://www.syracuseuniversitypress.syr.edu/books-in-print-series/middle-east-literature.html
The Committee was translated by Mary St. Germain and Charlene Constable with an afterword by Roger Allen.
*http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/sonallah-ibrahim-notes-from-prison/ for a selection of Ibrahim's notes from prison.

George Ovitt (5/5/13)

Argentina: The Dirty War

Departing at Dawn

(Viene clareando) by Gloria Lisé

Posterity forgets or acclaims.

              Walter Benjamin

Even the dedication page of Gloria Lisé’s 2005 novel about Argentina’s “Dirty War” is revealing:

 The story that follows is entirely fiction.

In memory of Isauro Arancibia, his brother,

Antilo Santillán, and Trinidad Iramain, whom I was never

able to meet, because they were killed without ever

being charged or having the right to a defense.

It is a juxtaposition that speaks volumes about Argentina, its politics and history, about the relationship between fact and fiction, and about the challenge to novelists like Lisé to make the world real to us—again and again and again.

The 19^th Century Argentinian author and exile, Domingo F. Sarmiento, best known for his protracted intellectual struggle against tyranny in Argentina, against dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, believed that his greatest enemy was not De Rosas and his kind, but silence and complicity. It was his determination as a writer “to stir emotions, to persuade, to verbalize the collective hatred and instigate a rebellion based not on bullets but on ideas.”* Such it is clear—were I to add “to remember” and “to heal”—was Gloria Lisé’s aim in her smart and affecting novel Departing At Dawn, the story of a politically indifferent medical student named Berta Cristina del Pino who, following the state-sponsored murder of her lover, is drawn headlong into the maelstrom of “La Guerra Sucia” or “The Dirty War”.

In 1976, when this novel begins, the government of President Isabel Peron has just been toppled by the right-wing military junta of Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla, a coup that ushered in “el Proceso” or “the Process of National Reorganization,” a seven-year reign of terror unmatched—even by Argentinian standards—in its brutality and repression.  Declassified documents cite an official estimate of 22,000 people killed or “disappeared” between 1975 and 1978.** Early in the novel Berta herself is forced to flee to the countryside, out of fear for her life, where she renews her acquaintance with her mother’s estranged family—with her frog-like aunt, Avelina, and her uncle, Tristán Nepomuceno, “el negro,” who spends his time collecting old nuts and bolts and serenading his favorite snails.

Departing At Dawn, what Luisa Valenzuela calls “a beautifully simple, poetic story of solidarity and love,” is in essence a story about a young woman’s search for identity and connection in a country traumatized by despotism and violence.  As translator Alice Weldon puts it in her helpful Afterword, “For Argentines Viene clareando creates connections between past and present, between public and private, and the way in which even the most apolitical citizen has been forced to confront the exigencies of political life.”

Gloria Lisé (March 22, 1961- ) is an Argentine writer, lawyer, professor, and an accomplished musician. She was fifteen years old in 1976 when a coup d'état overthrew the government of Isabel Martinez de Perón. She is the author of Con los Pies en el Escenario: Trayectoria del Grupo Arte Dramático y su Director Salo Lisé (2003), a book based on the life of her father, and Viene Clareando (2005), which was chosen by Argentina’s National Commission for the Protection of Public Libraries for distribution to the country’s public libraries. (The Feminist Press, Wikipedia)

Departing at Dawn is published in English by The Feminist Press, New York.  Be sure to check out their remarkable list. http://www.feministpress.org/

*I am grateful to Ilan Stavans for his introduction to Sarmiento’s extraordinary Facundo or, Civilization and Barbarism (Penguin Classics).  Part history, sociology, political commentary, and fiction, it is  a book I highly recommend.

** Political Injustice: Authoritarianism and the Rule of Law in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, Anthony W. Pereira, p. 134, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

Peter Adam Nash