By Céza Kassem Saying goodbye is always sad -- especially when it is to Naguib Mahfouz, a figure that has accompanied me throughout my adult life. He is a "living treasure", as the Japanese call such giants, one who has illuminated our lives, nourished our imagination and, above all, filled our memory with experiences we would never have known were it not for his novels and short stories. Hissak fil dunya (your voice echoes in the world); in Egypt it is often said to those we cherish though for most of us our voice is silenced once we die. Naguib Mahfouz's voice will remain loud and clear, for many generations to come, and not only in the Arab world. Like many others I have lived close to Mahfouz. Between 1974 and 1978 I immersed myself in the world of the Trilogy while writing my doctoral dissertation. Day and night I roamed the alleys of Old Cairo with Yassin, Fahmy and Kamal. Bayn Al-Qasrayn, Al-Sukkariyya and Qasr Al-Shawq were my hangouts. I turned every stone, climbed every minaret, stood at the door of every shop. The family of El-Sayyed Ahmed Abdel-Gawwad seemed at times closer than my own. But then this is what happens when you read Mahfouz. You enter a parallel world that is probably richer than the one in which you live, more meaningful, more intense. I have read almost everything that Mahfouz wrote, and always with a fresh sense of discovery. His characterisation is superlative. He moves with grace through the various forms of the novel, even inventing new forms as in Al-Maraya ( Mirrors ) and Awlad Haratina ( Children of Gebelawi). He renewed himself more than any other Arab novelist. He never wrote the same novel twice. His genius lay in his capacity to create the forms suited to different worlds. You would never guess Midaq Alley (1947), Miramar (1967) and Mirrors (1972) -- each a perfect example of its genre -- were written by the same novelist, that Hamida, desperate to escape her destiny and flee Midaq Alley, is the work of the same writer as Miramar, which presents different versions of the same story, told by different characters trapped together in a pension in Alexandria. In Mirrors Mahfouz sketches innumerable portraits that are separate, yet closely knit, each chapter presenting a single character. Little by little we discover the links that bind them together -- the ways in which people communicate or fail to do so, the bonds that are done and undone. Beneath this surface rolls the profound drama of human life; the richness of Mahfouz's work lies in its ability to present so many aspects of this drama. Despite the fact that Mahfouz never left his "room" he roamed in the broadest sense of the word, travelling across human experience, philosophy, history, psychology, science, manners and customs. In his Nobel acceptance speech he said that he was the child of two civilisations, one, the Pharaonic, 7,000 years old, the other, the Islamic, 1,400 years old. What he did not say is that he is also the son of his century, a century that, through his towering creativity, he helped to shape. The richness of Mahfouz's work comes from this intertwining of all these elements in his work. Few are the writers who could make such a mix. When working on the Trilogy I was able to detect in the fabric of the text all of these elements. As far as meaningfulness is concerned I would like to underline two aspects of Mahfouz that are among the major strands of his genius as a novelist. Meaning for Mahfouz is twofold. One is to encapsulate any experience in a story. He is one of the most consummate storytellers of modern world literature. The storyteller is a major figure in synthesising human experience, he takes what he tells from experience -- his own or that of others -- and makes it the experience of the listeners to his tale. The major philosophy behind storytelling is nominalism and not realism. Words are not abstractions, but represent the things they signify. Let me quote in this context the way in which Mahfouz, in his Nobel acceptance address, defined the two civilisations to which he belongs. He defines them by telling two stories. The first story is about a Pharaoh as told in old papyri: " Old papyri relate that Pharaoh had learned of the existence of a sinful relation between some women of the harem and men of his court. It was expected that he should finish them off in accordance with the spirit of his time. But instead he called to his presence choice men of law and asked them to investigate what he had come to learn. He told them he wanted the Truth so he could pass his sentence with Justice ." The second story defines Islamic civilisation: "In one victorious battle against Byzantium it [Islamic civilisation] has given back its prisoners of war in return for a number of books of the ancient Greek heritage in philosophy, medicine and mathematics." We come here to the second fold of meaning in Mahfouz's work. His are value-charged stories. In these two stories civilisations are great not because of historical achievements that can be recorded in papyri or in stone, but because of the values they transmit across the centuries, the Pharaoh who wanted to live by truth and justice, the warriors who valued knowledge above the spoils of war. Respect -- as shown towards subjects and foes -- is an eternal value, treasured from millennium to millennium and buried deep within the stories that are transmitted from generation to generation. It is not important whether these stories are a product of Mahfouz's imagination or whether they already existed. Their significance lies in the fact that they have been told, and will communicate their message to their listeners. The experiences related become ours; they enter our consciousness and our imagination, are saved into our memories. They enhance our understanding of what civilisations are, or ought to be. From my readings of Mahfouz over half a century, even when the details cannot be recalled a sense of intensity remains, a swirl of emotions that are sometimes heartrending. I am thinking, for example, of the final scene of Bidaya wa Nihaya (1959, English translation The Beginning and the End ), in which Nefissa commits suicide; there is probably a gap between my memory of the event and the precise details of the scene as written by Mahfouz, yet the emotional impact remains. It is there, deeply engraved, with all its tragedy. Intensity in Mahfouz comes from the tragic, in the Greek sense, from man's conflict with his destiny. Man and woman, because many of the Mahfouz's protagonists are women; he could see clearly that the destiny of women is as tragic, if not more so than, men's. But tragedy in Mahfouz is also very modern. He gives us a sense of the absolute, but also of the individual torn apart by the hellish machinations of history. Time has always been a major preoccupation of Mahfouz; it is merciless, "if you don't kill it, it kills you", he says in Hadrat Al-Muhtaram ( Respected Sir ). But we would not do justice to Mahfouz if we stopped here. Yes, he is a tragic writer but he is not a pessimist. He says so himself. This absence of pessimism -- which is not the same as optimism -- is due to the way he colours the tragic, and the colouring is typically Egyptian. It is mixed with compassion and a profound sense of humour. It is not the laughter that comes from great catastrophes - as the Arabic saying goes, shar al-baliyya ma yudhik - but a loud and frank laughter that rings with joy. It is not the laugh of irony but laugher that comes from a love of life, of the other, of God, of Nation, of Good and Justice and Truth. Dunya Allah, from the collection of short stories by the same title, 1962, translated as God's World ), could be considered the epitome of the Mahfouzian tragic. There is the profound sadness that comes from the wretchedness of social misery, the despair of the destitute who know no mercy, the unfairness of the distribution of happiness and despair, but we are not thrown into a world of violence, hatred, revenge and horror. "God's World" is a world of mercy and compassion, where hearts can still be filled with serenity and forgiveness despite the inevitability of destiny, the harshness of the human condition. The Nobel Prize committee's citation fore-grounded the Mahfouz "who, through works rich in nuance -- now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous -- has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind." Great art knows no boundaries. It is above time and place. Yet it is valid to ask if the perception of Mahfouz is the same for "us" as it is for "them", the Other. This is not to question Mahfouz's universal appeal. Think only of the Mexican director Arturo Ripstein who in 1992 began a collaboration with Mahfouz that resulted in Ripstein's film of Mahfouz's Bidaya wa Nihaya. The story was transposed to Mexico City, the Egyptian family transfigured into a Mexican one. The parallels drawn between Cairo and Mexico City are uncanny. The result was astounding, and the film won a number of prizes, among them the Grand Prix at the San Sebastian Festival in 1993. However universal great literature is, home is still home and not simply another space. Home nurtures a sense of belonging, and it is this that I feel when reading Mahfouz. It is born of neither chauvinism, nor nationalism; the sense of belonging is something that we choose with our own free will. We can choose, also, not to belong, if one day we find our bonds have been severed. Home is not necessarily our family, our country, our religion; home is where we feel safe, comfortable, at peace with ourselves. Today, unfortunately, the world at large cannot be our home. We have become estranged from the chaos that is tearing the world apart. Home is in a parallel world, Mahfouz's world, to which we can retreat when we have no other place to go.
