Nehad Selaiha joins in the diamond anniversary of Naguib Sorour's birth at the Metropole theatre Director Iman Al-Sirafi first met Naguib Sorour at the impressionable age of 17. The place where they met too -- a mental home in Alexandria where the 38-year-old renegade poet had been sent by the regime after a period in Al-Abassiya asylum in Cairo where he underwent electric shocks by way of punishment -- was bound to deeply affect the imagination of the adolescent Iman. He had read two of the great poet's plays and constantly recited them to his friends without knowing anything about their author. Then one day, a friend of his who worked as a male nurse in that home in Al-Muntazah told him that the man he so greatly admired was one of the inmates. For the next four years, until Sorour was released in 1974, a near wreck of a man, Al-Sirafi stuck faithfully to him and even persuaded the hospital authorities to let him out occasionally on weekends (on Iman's responsibility). Sorour used those brief spells of freedom to initiate his new young friends in theatre, poetry and politics and help them put together some performances. Though he knew he could be deprived of these outings if he did not toe the line and behave himself in public, Sorour could not be always trusted to hold his tongue, keep his views to himself and his close friends, or phrase them in less colourfully offensive language if he insisted on voicing them publicly. Al-Sirafi remembers how one morning, when Sorour happened to pass an expensive cosmetics shop, he suddenly stopped and, on the spur of the moment, devised and performed a little one-man street show in which he displayed his wonderful knack for witty punning, playing on the word 'Mum' he saw plastered on an expensive brand of deodorant in the window and its meaning in colloquial Arabic as 'food' to alert his audience to the shameful disparity which still existed after the revolution between the lives of the pampered, perfumed city people and the hungry, ill-smelling village-dwellers. For this naughty prank Sorour was rewarded with a brutal beating at the hands of the police while Al-Sirafi and others helplessly looked on. However far he travelled from his little village, Akhtab, in Al-Daqahleyya governorate east of the Delta, and even when he went abroad for 6 years, first to Russia, then to Hungary (from 1958 to 1964), Sorour could not forget his peasant roots, or the scenes of hunger, humiliation and abject poverty he witnessed as a child. One scene in particular scorched itself into his memory: the sight of his tall, proud father groveling on the ground and being beaten with the slipper of the feudal lord in the presence of the village elite. This outrageous episode, which he poignantly recorded in a poem, lingered in his mind like a live, red coal for the rest of his life, fuelling his fury against all forms of social injustice and oppression and lurking behind most of his works. Indeed, in a sense, all Sorour's achievements were attempts to make amends to his father for this mortifying incident, and a lot of his weaknesses, failures -- his often unfounded resentments and paranoid suspicions -- could be traced back to it. Given his humble peasant origins, Sorour predictably grew up a fervent opponent of feudalism, the monarchy and the British occupation. His earliest poems, written when he was 14, were triggered by the 1946 massive anti-British demonstrations which claimed the lives of many Egyptian students and workers. When it was time for university, his first impulse was to study law, the better to fight for Egypt's rights, perhaps; but after the 1952 coup d'etat which toppled the king, urged the immediate evacuation of all British troops from their last foothold in the Canal zone, publicly espoused socialism and promised drastic land reforms, he felt he could better serve the revolutionary cause as a writer and theatre-maker. He quit the faculty of law at Ein Shams University in his second year and joined the theatre institute to train in drama, acting and directing. The new regime was hot on using art and culture to gain popular support and propagate its new ideology. Towards this end, it embraced and advocated the concept of the politically committed artist, enshrining it as a sacred national duty, and making it a passport to prestigious jobs, public influence and other favours. The younger generations, innocent, sincere and idealistic, were particularly targeted and the regime sought to promote the most gifted among their ranks in the hope of forming a new revolutionary intelligentsia of unquestionable loyalty. This explains why immediately upon graduation, in 1956, Sorour was appointed actor and director in the state-run Popular Theatre Company which carried the new revolutionary ideas into the provinces. By 1958, his ardent support for the regime gained him a position as a member of the public censor's office, and within months he was dispatched to the Soviet Union (later moving to Hungary) to complete his ideological and theatrical training. Upon his return, in 1964, he was appointed on the staff of the theatre institute and in the same year Karam Metawe' directed his first play, Yaseen wi (and) Bahiyya (written in Budapest in 1963), at the Pocket theatre. Using the title, main characters and central conflict of an old ballad about the oppression of peasants by foreign rulers and landlords, Sorour transposed the story from Upper Egypt to Buhout -- a real village in the Nile Delta (like his native Akhtab) where a peasant uprising was brutally quelled a few years before the 1952 revolution. The original Yaseen, who in the Mawwal is treacherously shot in the back at night by the Pasha who covets his beloved, the 'radiant' Bahiyya (as her name denotes), is developed here into a popular hero who incites the peasants to revolt against their exploiters and dies fighting for freedom and justice, having built Bahiyya into a symbol of Egypt. In all aspects, the play seemed perfectly in tune with the regime's revolutionary rhetoric, it's championing of the unwritten history of the people and their oral literature and its conception of the ideological function of art. For Sorour, however, though at the time he still believed wholeheartedly in Nasser's national project and wanted to support it in every way he could, Yaseen and Bahiyya was much more than a mere political statement or propaganda sheet. It was primarily a cathartic exercise, undertaken in solitude, away from home and family, in the hope of exorcising the ghosts of his unhappy childhood in Akhtab and rehabilitating the image of the long abused, much maligned and invariably despised and ridiculed Egyptian peasant. It was also a formal experiment in developing a new type of 'authentic' Egyptian drama which consciously departs from the European model and its conventions and invokes, in its form, content and verbal texture, the oral folk tradition of storytelling established by the popular Sira and Mawwal (ballad) singers whom Sorour had often seen perform in his native village. More of a narrative poem (as it was labeled when it appeared in print in 1965) than a regular drama, and written by a peasant, about peasants and, purportedly, for peasants, but ironically aired through a highbrow, elitist venue, Yaseen and Bahiyya instantly became the talk of the town, whipping up many controversies and a lot of enthusiasm. Sorour, who had diligently contributed poetry and articles to Egyptian and Lebanese newspapers since the 1950s, in the hope of building a modest reputation, became a celebrity overnight and seemed set for a brilliant career as an original poet, innovative playwright, gifted director, esteemed academic and influential public figure. By 1967, however, when his next play Ah Ya Leil Ya Qamar (O, Night! O, Moon!) appeared at El-Hakim theatre, directed by Galal Al-Sharqawi, two things had happened which blighted his career: the failure of his marriage and Egypt's ignominious military defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. That the wife he adored and thoroughly trusted betrayed him was a stunning blow and its effect was compounded by the shock of the June defeat which appeared to his feverish mind as another personal defeat and a more cruel betrayal, this time by his beloved Nasser. Coming in close succession, the two shocks shattered Sorour's burgeoning self- confidence and faith in the future, aggravating his sense of insecurity and awakening his latent persecution complex. He deteriorated fast, progressively growing more aggressive, suspicious and withdrawn. But though he was sacked from the theatre institute, shunned by former colleagues and later confined to mental hospitals, Sorour continued to write, producing six more highly original plays:-- Ya Bahiya wi Khabereeni (Do Tell Me Bahiyya), Qulu li 'Ein el-Shams (Tell the Eye of the Sun), Mineen Ageeb Naas li Ma'nat El-Kalam Yequluh (Where Can I Find People Who Can Spell Out the Meaning of Words), Al-Kalimat Al-Mutaqati'a (Crossword Puzzles), Al-Hukm Qabl al-Midawlah (Verdict before Deliberation) and Al-Dhubab Al-Azraq (Blue Flies), as well as a dramatization of Naguib Mahfouz's novel, Miramar, and two adaptations of Brecht's The Three Penny Opera and Hamlet -- rechristened Malik Al-Shahateen (King of the Beggars) and Afkaar Gununiyah fi Dafter Hamlet (Mad Thoughts in Hamlet's Notebook). Sadly, of the original plays, only two were staged in his lifetime: Ya Bahiyya, which Sorour himself directed in the late 1960s, and Tell the Eye of the Sun, mounted at the National by Tawfiq Abdel-Latif in 1973. In 1975, Sorour recovered his teaching job only to lose it again a year later; he spent the last two years of his sadly short life a sick and penniless broken man. Except for a handful of faithful young disciples, like Al-Sirafi, and a few poor relatives who could do little for him, Sorour was quite friendless. In 1978, the man who had shown so much promise in 1964 died in a miserable hospital in Damanhour for lack of a dose of Insulin which the medical staff failed to provide, Sorour's life told honestly, in full, would make a profoundly moving, richly human drama. But this is a very tall order which cannot be met so long as Sorour continues to be a cult figure among theatre people and the literati I certainly did not hope for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth when I went to watch Iman Al-Sirafi's Kan Gada' ( He Was Quite a Guy ) at Metropole theatre. On the other hand, I did not expect a celebration marking the diamond anniversary of this great poet's birth to turn into a thoroughly lugubrious, tediously overdrawn, and cloyingly sentimental event. The intention was good, but the execution terrible. To want to give the audience a taste of Sorour's best plays and poetry and an insight into his tragic life, venting in the process your profound feelings of loss and anger, is legitimate; but to plunge the unsuspecting audience into an endless wake and douse them with an avalanche of mournful tunes, stretching their sympathies to breaking point, is, at best, counter productive. Having secured a notable composer like Farouk Al-Sharnoubi, who brought along his band of musicians and singers, including his 10-year old son, Al-Sirafi was overawed, lost control and turned the whole project over to the musician, or so it seemed. His script, made up of passages from Sorour's four major ballad-plays ( Yaseen, O, Night, The Eye of the Sun and Where Can I Find People), interspersed with some of the most stirring and revealing poems included in the four collections published after his death, played second fiddle to the music and seemed solely intended to highlight Al-Sharnoubi in a new capacity as both singer and performer -- two things he has neither the voice nor the training for. For nearly two hours, we were mercilessly bombarded with 19 monotonous songs, most of them horribly mushy solos, awkwardly and embarrassingly delivered by the maestro and his son as they aimlessly strolled round the darkened stage, their faces deeply contorted with emotion. To alleviate the boredom, Al-Sirafi roped in choreographer Dia Mohamed who provided some pallid tableaux vivant and feeble background dancing consisting mostly of lamentation rituals and funereal postures. Mohamed Hashim's set was brash and painfully over cluttered and his costumes, uniformly black and ill-designed were an eye sore. Curiously, though there always seemed to be a lot more on stage than was actually needed, the performance seemed desolately forsaken and rang hollow. But for the zestful actors who valiantly wrestled with the music to put across something of the text and the spirit of Sorour, this tribute to the unhappy great poet would have turned into a veritable travesty.
