Hala Sami lauds the wistful reflections on time in a new collection of short stories Mahmoud Abu Doma, Nostalgia: Hekayat Kharifiya (Nostalgia: Stories of Autumn), introduced by Nehad Selaiha (Cairo: Dar Sharqiyat, 2006) Mahmoud Abu Doma is an Egyptian playwright and stage director. Founder of an independent theatre group, based in Alexandria, called the Alternative Theatre Group, Abu Doma is originally from Upper Egypt, more specifically, Sohag. Several of the stories in the current volume have Upper Egypt as their context. The volume consists of reflections on old age or bygone days, hence its subtitle, "Stories of Autumn". The texts in this volume are narratives of an introspective nature which can be also considered dramatic monologues. In fact, as Nehad Selaiha informs us in her valuable introduction, they were actually performed on stage. The texts are variations on the theme of nostalgia, which is the principal issue that holds them together. The nostalgic mood pervades all the stories, hence the title story with which Abu Doma launches his volume: "In books, nostalgia is yearning for the past; yet, in reality, nostalgia is something different altogether. It is how to bid farewell to the past, while the latter does not really bid you farewell. Your eyes do not shed a single tear so as not to ruin the beauty of the moment. It is to silently suffer and love pain a love so pure." The protagonist recollects incidents and people of his past life, while looking at himself in the mirror. He attempts to come to grips with his own reflection, one that looks familiar but that he refuses to recognise. In this initial story, the repetition, with some variation, of the sentence "he is standing in front of the mirror" four times underlines the protagonist's confrontation with time. The mirror reflects the person he has become with the lapse of time. Time, with a capital T, is the invincible power that looms large in one's final years. Abu Doma establishes an analogy between Man and the sunflower, which significantly, in Arabic is called "the sun- worshipper" ( Abbaad al-shams" ). And what is the sun, here, but a marker of time? Man is at the mercy of time. The person standing in front of the mirror "was preoccupied with the pictures that went by in his life and did not want to return." One cannot rewind time. At one point, the protagonist subtly attempts to defy time: "He stood before the mirror and fixed his eyes on it. The reflection in the mirror was someone else's, unfamiliar to him. It was the face of someone he could not remember. Between the gaze and the reflection in the mirror, there is a moment. One single moment passed, but it was full of the details of his life. The moment was against time, going in the opposite direction." Here it is worth noting that many of Abu Doma's narratives/dramatic monologues are reminiscent of the French writer Marcel Proust's renowned work In Search of Lost Time. The latter is concerned with the narrator's memory and recollection of past events, as well as the link between them. Proust's memoire involontaire ( involuntary memory) is a concept that occurs when past experience is vividly conjured up. Such vividness totally eliminates the temporal distance between the original past event and its re- invocation in the present time. In another story, "The Oculist" -- an old designation in Arabic, "Kahhal Oyoun" -- the author laments various vocations that have become decadent and obsolete in Egypt. The fact that the protagonist becomes an undertaker is symbolic of the decadence of such small occupations as the coppersmith, the night patroller, the groom, the saddler and the water-bearer. They are no longer needed: "When time crept in and wrote its last word, this skill was gone forever." Therefore, the central character, an oculist, has to adopt another occupation. He goes by his father's advice and chooses one that is indispensable: he becomes an undertaker. His past vocation inspired life, but in order to survive, he ironically shifts to one that is associated with death. Abu Doma's protagonist is constantly struggling against time, which becomes the villain of his short narratives. In "The Oculist", there is an attempt to subvert time when the protagonist views his newly adopted vocation as "a delivery process, but the other way around": "When he learned that it was time, he reached out to hold the dead man from his shoulders and started to take him into the tomb's opening bit by bit." But, suddenly, the deceased wakes up and, having no other choice to cover his nakedness, he puts on the undertaker's clothes to go back to life! "`Gamlet' in Russian means `Hamlet'" is a story with political undertones and criticises Egypt's desertion of its cultural roots. It refers to a particular historical period, the 1960s, when the country was abiding by Soviet Socialism, but was culturally very prosperous. Once again, with the temporal drift, old political systems subside, while new systems emerge. Now that the Russians have left, American commercialism has taken over. To Abu Doma, "the tree itself abandoned its root." One of the most touching narratives of the volume is "Faransa's Ghosts." It carries the tone of a folktale set in one of the major provinces of Upper Egypt. Faransa is a young Coptic girl who used to live in a house with an old Muslim woman, and when, one day, the house collapses over their heads, people think that it was only inhabited by the old woman and are totally oblivious of young Faransa's existence. They dispose of her together with the rubble "as if the house never existed". The house is no more, but Faransa's ghost still haunts the place, which echoes Abu Doma's opening paragraph to the effect that you bid the past farewell, but the past never really leaves you. The story is an example of woman's empowerment. Although the protagonist is rather an old woman, she borrows her strength and youth from the young girl who lives with her. With the house's collapse, the old woman's life, just like the house, expires. But Faransa's ghost continues to haunt the premises across time. Significantly, in this tale, as in another, Abu Doma cares to highlight how Egyptians, Muslims and Christians alike, are very much closely knit in the very texture of the Egyptian identity. Furthermore, some of the stories have female protagonists who play leading roles. They exemplify Upper Egyptian women with a remarkable integrity of character. "A Star Never Disappears from the Sky" is a tribute or a eulogy to Omar Negm, hence the play on words in Arabic: " Omr Negm ma yekhtefi men el sama " as opposed to "Omar Negm", the name of the person to whom the story is dedicated. The author establishes an analogy between the hero and the moon. There is an alternation between third person narration, which sounds like a chorus or the oracle of a Greek tragedy, and first person narration uttered by the hero himself. The story seems to be inspired by the tales of Greek mythology. It displays a very poetic style in rendering the death of the hero. In "Stillness, not Followed by Motion" (in other words, death), the protagonist visits the house that witnessed his childhood after a long absence. Everything has grown old; even the plain furniture of the protagonist's childhood house, does not escape time markers. His face, which is portrayed behind iron bars, is strongly symbolic of his entrapment behind the bars of time. We are at the mercy of time that holds us in captivity: "The wood of the big house door was full of holes and wounds... against my will, my hand reached out to my face as if carving it all over again. My face also had many lines." Abu Doma's style is very graphic. He delineates a scene or event as if it is a stroke of the brush. At one point, in the same story, the protagonist tells us "My neck turned towards the iron window, behind which I could see many faces that had passed from here and left like the years." The final narrative is an invitation to learn from history, in other words, to learn the lessons of time instead of being oblivious of them. The stories are written in colloquial language, whether everyday Egyptian urban language or the language of the folk in the case of those stories that are deeply rooted in rural Egypt. The narratives also reveal the recurrence of certain sentences, which lends them a poetic tone; this, in its turn also seems to acquire a tinge of the folkloric and corroborate their appropriateness for the stage. The narratives discussed here illustrate the principal character's constant struggle in a confrontation with time. He either challenges it, yields to it, laments his helplessness in its face or attempts to subvert it. In all cases, he experiences nostalgia. The author's seven autumnal short narratives/dramatic monologues touch a string in each one of us. Their significance reaches beyond the local to the universal. Hail to Abu Doma! Nostalgia is a must-read.
