Book review: Scents from Alexandria

Al Shaimaa Hamed's short story collection explores the stories on the margins of Alexandria and picks at the secrets they contain

Al Shaimaa Hamed's short story collection Lavender is a treat for the senses. Published in 2010, Hamed's second collection of stories is a feast of 21 tales, all of which take place in the city that adorns the Mediterranean coast.
Hamed's stories are a beautiful blend of bare emotions, brilliantly drawn characters, secrets and tales from the heart. The voices of her characters are those of the unheard: the marginalized and untold stories combined with her brilliant use of sensory images create an Alexandrian potpourri and sketch a history on the margins of the known tales.
The first story 'Ice-cream', is one of various snapshots that focus on a single event. A relationship is ending silently between the anonymous protagonist and his partner as the ice-cream melts. The passage of time as the ice-cream melts is used to exemplify how much his partner has had to wait in the past. She has always waited for him while he has always been late, revealing a particular attitude to their relationship. When she fails to show up, the ice-cream falls on his shoe, messing it up so he may taste his own sweet medicine.
In each of the stories, Hamed weaves a web of intricate details around something that can be felt or tasted, smelt, heard and visualized, creating a sensorial experience. In 'Lavender' we hear the inner monologue of the main character - a coma patient - whose voice is silenced and actions restricted, yet the smell of lavender, the sounds of music and the feel of "his hand" give her a sense of time and place. Her struggle to survive is made vivid by the attention to the smells and sounds around her and in the insistence to breathe as she tells herself, describing her situation as stuck "in a long tunnel with two exits, [she] is exactly in the middle. At times, [she] is attracted by the scents, sounds and images which pull towards an exit opening to the living world she longs for. Then all these things retreat and [she] is pulled towards the other exit by the possibility of the everlasting soaring [she] is yet to experience."
The cacophonous sounds of the city and the streets are orchestrated around the characters in other longer stories like 'Ra'eha' (Scent) and 'Azeezy Gabriel' (Dear Gabriel). Both are narrated in the first person yet each "I" offers a completely different person and history. 'Ra'eha' is a day in the life of a homeless man who lives on the street near the Sidi Bishr neighbourhood in Alexandria, and the city is viewed through his eyes: the public bathrooms, the stench of the garbage where he relieves himself, the railways and the taste of leftover sandwiches he waits for every day. His identity, he believes, lies in his smell. On the chosen day, his ex-wife, Sanaa, comes to pick him up to clean him in order to attend his daughter's wedding. The story doesn't just end with Sanaa undressing him and his very innocent declaration that she "has stopped loving his smell a long, long time ago." It goes on to give him and Sanaa more flesh and more humanity: her unhappiness and longing for attention against his own individuality and sense of self through his smell.
'Azeezy Gabriel' is a letter to the renowned writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in which, a known device for short stories, Hamed's story creates a life which is about to burst out of the frame of the letter. The writer is a woman who chose to live in her own world: selling fresh mint, falling in love with a sailor and writing letters to Marquez. The tone of intimacy is realized in the details she gives to Marquez in the letter: the familiar sounds, smells and feel of Alexandria as she knows it become familiar to Marquez and the reader as her letter goes on.
In Lavender, secrets are oyster shells, some of which remain unopened. The wood of a broken tree branch in the protagonist's bedroom keeps a secret in 'Assaal El-Khashab' (Wood Honey), which becomes the only living memory of his lost partner: the woman is sketched out of the smell and texture of the wood and the connection she had with the sea that witnessed her birth and later swallowed her. The motif of the wood and the sea is the key to revealing loose details of the nature of the bond between them and the loss he feels.
The last eight stories are connected through barely noticeable details through which Hamed creates a tapestry of time and place. She begins with modern day Alexandria with the voice of a woman who lives with a unique rhythm in the first story: 'Ustorat Al-Ragul Al-Hade' fi Haza Al-'Alaam…Al-'Alaam Al-Gameel' (The Legend of the Quiet Man in this World…This Beautiful World). The origins of the history are revealed in the second story, 'Madafe' Navarone' (Guns of Navarone), where Alexis flees Crete for Alexandria in 1841 with a pair of phoenix earrings with rubies; a departure gift from his mother. History moves forward from 1841 with the tales bringing an epic-like feel to each one through the connections, lineage and the threads she takes from one story to another spanning more than a century to return to her chosen point of beginning.
The craft of writing identifies Hamed's work. It is smooth – even the bumps in the flow of narration seem deliberate. However, she does not leave her readers fully satisfied. There are still things to know, smell and imagine. Her writing fills out spaces in time and in human relationships by playing on the five senses. Quoting Ibrahim Abdul Meguid, the Alexandrian writer, he describes Al-Shaimaa Hamed as "a writer who has read, known and fully digested the art of the short story and now she brings it back to us carrying her unique presence and her special – her very special – voice."
Lavender, Al Shaimaa Hamed, Cairo: Bayt Al-Yasmine, 2010.