“Prison was my university,” Ibrahim writes in his own introduction
to the
Notes
, and indeed the entries read at times
like a syllabus, or a wish list for future reading. “Must read
Ulysses
,” he writes in December 1962, when he was
twenty-five years old. And three months later, “Must read Proust.” The diaries
have relatively little to say about prison routine or with Ibrahim’s personal
life, in part because he feared the notes might be seized and used against him.
Nevertheless, a picture does emerge between the lines of an intensely
intellectual environment. Most of the Communists’ reading seems to have been
acquired through the prison guards, who occasionally spent a week in Cairo or
Alexandria and were easily bribed. Cultural supplements from Cairene newspapers
formed a large part of the prisoners’ reading. An ex-leader of the party, Henri
Curiel, who arranged for the prisoners’ legal defense from his exile in Paris,
also sent copies of
La Nouvelle Critique
, which one
of the French-speaking inmates would translate for the rest. The arrival of
Naguib Mahfouz’s
The Cairo Trilogy
caused such
excitement that the prisoners drew up a waiting list for readers. During the
day, the inmates buried their library in the sand outside the cells. (This same
bookish and clandestine milieu was cultivated by Muslim Brotherhood prisoners,
who shared jails with the Communists, though the two groups kept mostly to
themselves. Indeed, much of modern Egyptian intellectual history was born in
Nasser’s prisons.)
Three central interests stand out in Ibrahim’s diaries. The first is
the importance of literature from the USSR. Soviet culture was viewed by the
Egyptian Communists as a mirror, a model, and a warning. It was more advanced,
but also more damaged than their own. The diary is full of the news about
Novy Mir
, the Soviet monthly that briefly served as a
forum for liberal opposition in the wake of de-Stalinization. For fathomable
reasons, one of the first books Ibrahim read after his release is Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, first
published in
Novy Mir
in 1962. There are several
entries that hint at connections Ibrahim was making between Soviet and Egyptian
experience, often by way of citation rather than commentary. In May of 1963, he
reproduces a passage by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, among the most famous poets in the
world at the time (now hardly read), whose memoirs were being serialized in the
French magazine
L’Express
: “To explain away the cult
of Stalin’s personality by saying that it was imposed by force is, to say the
least, rather naïve,” Yevtushenko writes. “Many genuine Bolsheviks arrested at
that time refused to believe that this had happened with his knowledge, still
less on his personal instructions. Some of them, after being tortured, traced
the words ‘Long Live Stalin’ in their own blood on the walls of their prison.”
Given what Ibrahim says elsewhere about the Egyptian Communists’ perverse
relation to Nasser, which he describes as “absolute support from our side;
repression and murder from his side,” it is easy to see why this particular
anecdote jumped out at him.
Ibrahim’s dilemma might be thought of in this way: how to write
oppositional art when the regime in power has already stolen your best lines?
The attractiveness of Yevtushenko, it would seem, is that he briefly supplied a
model for how one might remain a Communist despite communism — or, as he writes
in his memoir, how one maintains “faith in the original purity of the
revolutionary idea despite all the filth that has since desecrated it.” It is
from the Soviet writers that Ibrahim gets his obsession with “telling the
truth,” an idea that crops up incessantly in the writings of Yevtushenko and
others quoted in the
Notes
. For the Soviets, this
meant telling the truth about Stalin and the Gulag. For Ibrahim, it meant
telling the truth about Nasserism.
But what is the style of truth telling? Here is where the second,
somewhat more surprising feature of these diaries appears, their immersion in
American literature and especially in Hemingway. A long series of notes from
June 1963 concern Carlos Baker’s book,
Hemingway, the
Writer as Artist
, which had been recently translated into Arabic by
the Palestinian scholar Ihsan Abbas. Ibrahim’s notes focus on
The Green Hills of Africa
, Hemingway’s 1935 account of
a hunting trip on the Serengeti Plain. Ibrahim quotes from Baker’s citation of a
long discussion between Hemingway and Pop, another hunter, where they discuss
what it’s like to witness a revolution. The conversation also serves as a
statement of literary method. Hemingway as himself says about revolutions,
It’s very hard to get anything true on anything you haven’t
seen yourself because the ones that fail have such a bad press and the winners
always lie so. Then you can only really follow anything in places where you
speak the language. That limits you of course. That’s why I would never go to
Russia. When you can’t overhear it’s no good. All you get are handouts and
sight-seeing. Any one who knows a foreign language in any country is damned
liable to lie to you. . . . If I ever write anything about this, it will just be
landscape painting until I know something about it. Your first seeing of a
country is a very valuable one. Probably more valuable to yourself than to any
one else, is the hell of it. But you ought to always write it to try to get it
stated. No matter what you do with it.
You ought to always write it to try
to get it stated.
The phrase is underlined in Ibrahim’s diary. The
Arabic translation reads, “
Uktub, uthbit ma tarahu wa-ma
tasma‘uhu
”: “Write, set down what you see and hear.” It is clear that
Ibrahim’s minimalism owes something to Hemingway, a fact I have tried to keep in
mind in my own translation. Might this iconic, endlessly imitated style come
back to English readers, made strange and new after a detour through Cairo?
Ibrahim takes other tips from Hemingway. The technique of italicized flashback,
used several times in
That Smell
, is borrowed from
Hemingway’s short story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” But what appears to have
struck Ibrahim most about Hemingway is the American writer’s commitment to the
quotidian, to the truth of what he sees and hears. Ibrahim proves that this
style, unbuttressed by commentary, could make its own revolutionary statement.
(Equally interesting, of course, is what Ibrahim doesn’t take from Hemingway:
macho posturing is not in his narrator’s repertoire.)
The third central concern of these notebooks is with the varieties
of realism. This was a live issue in Egyptian literary circles at the time.
Socialist realism was a dominant mode of the previous decade, most notably in
Abd al-Rahman al-Sharaqwi’s
The Earth
(1952), a
novel of class conflict in a village of the Nile Delta.
The
Earth
was celebrated by proponents of
engagé
literature and spawned a host of imitators. But by the early sixties, in
the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, socialist realism was considered by many,
even on the left, as the house style of Stalinism. Another strain of realism,
what we might call classical realism, culminated in the novels of Naguib
Mahfouz. His suite of historical fictions,
The
Cairo Trilogy
,
is a
minute and comprehensive depiction of Egyptian life in the first half of the
twentieth century, refracted through the prism of a well-to-do family. But the
conventions of classical realism, which presume a relatively stable class system
to anchor its ambitious survey of social life, were unable to represent the
shifts brought about by Nasser’s reforms. The explosion of a lower middle-class
population, largely employed by the expansionist state, and the resultant
consumer society with its characteristic entertainments (movies, television,
popular clubs) and objects of desire (refrigerators, electronics, suits), proved
too much new material to squeeze into the strictures of Mahfouzian technique. In
order for realism to remain realistic — this is Ibrahim’s insight — it would
have to become experimental.
In this sense,
Notes from Prison
can be
read as a late episode in the debate between Realism and Modernism among
intellectuals such as Georg Lukács, Berthold Brecht, and Walter Benjamin during
the 1930s and ’40s — the great age of speculation about the relationship between
politics and literature. Those debates were still alive in the pages of
La Nouvelle Critique
, albeit in simplified form, and
both Lukács and Brecht make appearances in Ibrahim’s reading diary. For these
writers the chief question was how to create a modern art form that would, in
Marx’s words, force mankind “to face with sober senses the real conditions of
their lives and their relations with fellow men” — with the ambition,
ultimately, to transform those conditions. If this goal now seems grandiose,
that speaks to the reduced place literature holds in our own life rather than a
flaw in the ambition. Ibrahim’s response to this question, as evidenced by the
Notes
and his novel, was to focus on the terrain
of the everyday. His fiction suggests that it is within the workday routine of
gossip, casual consumption, and bodily experience — washing, eating, sex — that
politics are most immediately felt and known. This is true even or especially
when what one feels most of all is the absence of politics. It is his concern
for the quotidian that seems to explain Ibrahim’s notes on the films of Italian
Neo-Realism and cinema verité. And indeed the narrator of
That Smell
acts as a kind of camera, recording the life around him
while abstaining from comment.
Except in a few cases, Ibrahim did not have access to the texts
mentioned in the
Notes
in the original language, or
even in translation. He did not read the novels or poems, and did not see the
films that he worried over for hundreds of pages. Instead, he imagined them as
they were described or excerpted in the pages of Cairo’s cultural supplements,
French journals, and American magazines. (For this edition, I have tried to
locate the works cited by Ibrahim, but have based my translations on the Arabic
of the
Notes
, even when that version is different
from the original.) Ibrahim’s Hemingway is, in this sense, a dream of Hemingway,
a famous style filtered through a scrim of secondary and tertiary literature, as
well as translations. Perhaps this way of reading is what made it easy for
Ibrahim to pick and choose what he found useful for his own work. To cobble
together bits of Solzhenitsyn with bits of
The Green Hills
of Africa
and bits of other things and come up with a style unique in
Arabic literature. This search for models — “influence” is too passive a word to
describe what Ibrahim is doing; it is more like bricolage — was made under
severe restrictions. His library was limited to whatever the jailers picked up
in the kiosks, or friends on the outside thought would be good for him to read.
It is not by chance that in later work such as
The
Committee
or
Zaat
, the protagonists are
literary scavengers, collectors of ephemera, people who cannot help picking up
the newspaper but never entirely believe what they read there.
In October of 2003, Ibrahim was given the Arab Novel Award, an honor
bestowed by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. To the surprise of many in the
audience, familiar with his reputation as a dissident, Ibrahim attended the
ceremony and delivered a now legendary speech. Instead of a gracious acceptance,
his speech was an uncompromising attack on the Mubarak regime. In Egypt, Ibrahim
observed, “We no longer have any theater, cinema, scientific research, or
education. Instead, we have festivals and the lies of television.” He went on,
“Corruption and robbery are everywhere, but whoever speaks out is interrogated,
beaten, and tortured.” In view of this “catastrophe” Ibrahim had no choice but
to refuse the prize, “for it was awarded by a government that, in my opinion,
lacks the credibility to bestow it.” A little less than eight years later, that
regime — or at least its chief officer — was toppled. The role of artists and
intellectuals in the new Egypt is far from clear. The state’s powers of coercion
are formidable and it is possible the old ways of doing things will survive with
minor adjustments (increased subsidies for “Islamic” art, for example). But
whatever the outcome of the recent revolts,
That Smell
will remain as an example of self-critical artistry at work in a moment
of historical crisis. I hope it may also find an audience in translation.
ROBYN CRESWELL
THAT SMELL
This race and this country and this life produced me. . . . I
shall express myself as I am.
— James Joyce,
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
W
hat’s your address?
the officer said. I don’t have an address, I said. He looked at me, surprised.
Then where are you going? Where will you live? I don’t know, I said. I don’t
have anyone. He said, I can’t let you go like that. I used to live by myself, I
said. We have to know where you’re living so we can come at night, he said. One
of the policemen will go with you. And so we went into the street, the policeman
and I, and I looked around curiously. It was the moment I’d been dreaming of for
years and I searched myself for some feeling that was out of the ordinary, some
joy or delight or excitement, but found nothing. People walked and talked and
acted as if I’d always been there with them and nothing had happened. The
policeman said, Let’s take a taxi, and I saw that he wanted to have an easy time
while I paid. We went to my brother’s place and he said to me on the stairs that
he was traveling and had to lock up, so we went downstairs and then to my
friend’s house. My friend said, My sister’s here, I can’t let you in. We went
back down to the street. The policeman was getting annoyed. His eyes had a mean
look and I figured that he wanted a few piastres. We can’t go on like this, he
said, let’s go to the station. At the station there was another policeman.
You’re a problem, he said. We can’t let you go. I sat across from him and set my
bag on the floor and lit a cigarette and when it was night he said there was
nothing he could do. He called in a third policeman and said, Put him in the
holding pen. So they led me to a cell with a fourth policeman standing by the
door. He patted me down and took my money and put it in his pocket and pushed me
into a big room with a wooden bench all around the walls and I sat down on the
bench. There were a lot of men there and the door kept opening to let more in. I
felt something in my knee. I put my hand down and sensed something wet. I looked
at my hand and found a big patch of blood on my fingers and in the next moment
saw swarms of bugs on my clothing and I stood up and noticed for the first time
big patches of blood smeared on the walls of the cell and one of the men laughed
and said to me, Come here. Some of the men were sitting on the ground and one of
them had spread a ratty blanket on the ground and I found a little space on the
edge and sat there with my chin on my knees. The man with the blanket said to
me, Why don’t you sleep? But there was no room for me, so I said, I’d rather
just sit like this. Another one asked me, Drugs? No, I said. Robbery? No, I
said. Murder? No. Bribery? No. Counterfeiting? No. So the man got quiet and
confused and began looking at me with a strange look. I started to shiver with
cold so I got up to walk around, then sat back down. I got tired of sitting and
shifted my position. One of the men took out a blanket he had folded beneath him
and got ready to sleep. I amused myself chasing the bugs scurrying across the
floor and killing them. Then I dropped my head abruptly to my chest. I didn’t
want them to see my face. They had begun to fall asleep. In front of me, an old
man lay on the bench. The policeman opened the door and called over to him,
saying, There’s someone here for you. The old man came back carrying a blanket
and a pillow and stretched out on the bench, covering himself with the blanket
and resting his head on the pillow and soon he was asleep, breathing heavily,
unbothered by the bugs. Next to him a man sat looking right at me with his hands
shoved into the pockets of his open jacket, which showed his bare chest. He
wasn’t wearing anything underneath the jacket. This man let out a strange and
horrible howl then stood up and came over, staring at me and laughing in my face
and then sat down next to me. He stared into space, confused. He howled. A big
young man got up and hit him in the face. The madman raised his arms to protect
his face and said, Don’t hit me. The young man hit him and hit him and I heard
the sound of bones cracking. He fell down where he was and he was breathing hard
and the others laughed. The man with the blanket gathered up the blanket and
spread it over himself and a chubby kid sleeping next to him. Before the blanket
covered him, I saw the kid’s face. He had pink skin and pouty lips. He was deep
in sleep with his knees drawn up. The man spread the lower part of the blanket
on top of him, then wiggled close. I watched his arm beneath the blanket moving
across the kid’s body, taking off his pants. The man’s leg pressed against the
kid’s back. The big young man who had beaten up the madman sat close by. He
followed what was going on beneath the blanket and every so often he raised his
eyes to meet with mine. Soon the movements under the blanket stopped and the kid
got up, throwing off the cover and rubbing sleep out of his eyes while looking
down between his legs. I dozed off. I woke up, still sitting. I didn’t see the
big young man, then noticed his leg beneath the blanket. He was asleep with the
kid in his arms. I stood up and walked around and the blanket twitched and the
young man gathered it up, wrapping it around himself, and the kid lay there with
nothing to cover his legs and the darkness began to lighten. I watched the early
morning light come in and at last they opened the cell so we could wash up. They
made the kid clean the yard. The others brought food and had breakfast and the
kid came to the door and said, Didn’t you leave anything for me? And the young
man said, No. The policeman began to read off names and I heard my name and got
my bag and went out and found my sister waiting for me with yesterday’s
policeman. He gave me a little notebook with my name and picture in it and my
sister and I went out into the street. Do you want something to drink? she said.
I want to walk, I said. She took me to an apartment in Heliopolis and I took
some clean clothes and went into the bathroom and shut the door behind me and
took off my clothes and stood naked beneath the showerhead. Then I rubbed my
body with soap and turned the shower on. I lifted my head and fixed my eyes into
the little eyes of the showerhead. The water pouring from it made me blink. I
looked down and watched the soap and the water running off my body and onto the
floor and into the drain. I rubbed my body with soap again and again I watched
the water mixing with the soap and carrying it into the drain. I closed my eyes
and stood still beneath the water. Then I turned off the tap and used a towel to
dry my body slowly and dressed and walked out and lit a cigarette. My sister
said, Let’s go to the cinema, so we did. It was a movie about birds that kept
getting bigger and multiplying until they became very wild and went after people
and attacked children. I got a terrible headache. We went back to the apartment
and my sister busied herself with cleaning. She went from the living room to the
kitchen to the bedroom while I smoked and kept away from the window. I took off
my clothes and stretched out on the bed. The bell rang so I got up and opened
the door and it was the policeman who was knocking. Just a moment, I said. I
went quickly to my room and brought the notebook and he wrote his name by the
date and left. I went back to the bed and threw myself on top of it and lit a
cigarette and stared at the ceiling. The policeman came back. I stayed stretched
out on the bed without sleeping. I smoked a lot. In the morning I got up and
dressed and went out. I bought a sandwich and all the morning’s papers and
caught a metro and watched the car doors closing. I was in the car next to the
women’s car and I started examining the wome
n one by one. Their hair was combed
in a very complicated way and their faces were heavy with paint. I got off at
Emergency Station and there was a man lying on the sidewalk next to the wall. He
was covered with bloody newspapers and a group of women had gathered in the
street, wearing black sheets and waving their hands and ululating over him in
grief. I got on a bus going to Mona’s house. Her mother met me and I kissed her
hand. She didn’t recognize me at first, then we sat down to talk and I had to
tell her about her husband. I said that I had been with him until the end.