By Mursi Saad El-Din I am always surprised when I read writings by up-and-coming hopefuls which reflect experiences that need a long life life- span to acquire. I often ask myself whether this is a flight of fancy. Can a 30- year-old writer -- of poetry, novels or short stories -- have had the time to go through such extremes of agony and happiness, poverty and prosperity, as to write with much understanding of all these conditions? These questions came to my mind again while I was reading three books, or rather booklets, by a young woman in her 30s, Hala El-Banna. The mere titles of the three books bespeak an ambitious writer: Reflections, a collection of poems, Violin Man, a novella or long short story and, this the most surprising as far as I am concerned, Men and Women with Broken Hearts: A Guide to Prevention and Treatment. In poetry and in fiction, flights of fancy are legitimate. But what about advice to broken hearts? Going through this slim and beautifully-produced volume, I felt I was receiving advice from my granddaughter. What characterises El-Banna's advice is that it is dispensed in verse. El-Banna goes over the history of broken hearts. I do not know her family or social background but, judging by all her allusions, she must have had many opportunities to travel and to read widely. From Shakespeare, she cites Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Desdemona. She also writes about the German poet Rilke (whose poems, incidentally, were part of the curriculum when I was a student at Foad I University, later renamed Cairo University), about the letters of Abelard and Heloise, about Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, and even Pablo Picasso. But, alongside these purely western examples, El-Banna mentions Ahmed Teymour Pasha and his comprehensive collection of proverbs, Al-Amthal Al- 'Ammiya (Folk Proverbs). Surprisingly, amid all these literary references, El-Banna writes about Princess Diana ("The Queen of Hearts was heartbroken") and Senator Hillary Clinton ("A woman with a broken heart / Yet her strong nature / Helped her survive the turmoil"). In Violin Man, El-Banna uses a mixture of poetry and prose to tell a romantic tale of love and disappointment, of people who are struck by "Cupid's Arrow". To add to the romanticism, the heroine is "a painter and a poetess [who is] romantic by nature". The hero happens to be a "a violin man with such a romantic outlook". The prose in this book is interspersed with verse. This, to my mind, is a modern version of the Greek chorus. Or perhaps a more apt comparison would be to the bard, or village poet, who sings the saga of Abu Zeid Al-Hilali to the accompaniment of his rababa. Violin Man is used as a vehicle to express many ideas and emotions: hope and despair, frustration, and desire for justice. But, then again, reading through the novella one finds that it is in fact more than a love story, comprising as it does commentary on world affairs: "How much more have we to endure? / How much more shall we suffer? / How much more ill- treatment shall we receive? / How much more agony shall we witness? / How much more blood shall we shed? /... How many more hearts will be broken?" I must admit that when I finished reading El-Banna's three works, though I very much enjoyed them, I asked myself whether this was the ambitious start of a writer who will become established in due course, or whether this is a passionate outpouring that will not last, a passing fad, that is. Only time will tell.
