By Mohamed Salmawy In a recent encounter with Naguib Mahfouz American writer Laban Carrick Hill said that Mahfouz's novel The Search had changed his life Hill: I read The Search in an English translation in the seventies and was fascinated by the protagonist, Saber, who was looking for his father. Saber was looking for many other things, including the meaning of life. After I read the novel for the third time I started doing the same. I started looking beyond the clichés of American life. The Search was for me a critique of the American way of life. Even now, when I talk about this novel to my friends, I don't say I read it. I embraced it. I made it into a way of life. It doesn't matter that Saber didn't find his father in the end since the novel is about the search itself. Technically speaking, it was a total departure from the traditions of the novel as we find them in Charles Dickens for example, although it had a tragic ending. Mahfouz: It's been a long time since I wrote the novel. Hill: I feel as if you wrote it today. Its topic is more relevant today than at anytime before. The protagonist is caught between two worlds, just as today's young are caught between the old and the new, between history and modernity, between fundamentalism and the modern world. This novel was a harbinger of the conflict between East and West we see today. How do you see the relationship between East and West right now? Mahfouz: I see it as a sick relationship in need of treatment for the sake of humanity. The world cannot continue like this, with ongoing conflicts between its Eastern and Western halves. We have to do something. We need to reach an understanding and recognise the differences between cultures. The Arab East has a strong cultural identity and cannot become a mirror image of life in America. For our part, we need to understand the United States. After all, it is the strongest country in the world now and we must learn to live with it. It affects our life, whether we like it or not. Hill: This is true. The way I see it is that the Middle East is also influencing US life more now than at anytime. It used to be that African culture had a tremendous impact on American life, especially in the fields of culture and art. Now I expect the Middle East to have a similar effect. Arab poetry has been discovered recently in the United States and many of our young poets read and enjoy it. You can see how this type of poetry is affecting their style. Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali has introduced young readers to this poetry. I believe that the face of American poetry is changing as a result, just as your novels change those who read them. Mahfouz: Culture brings people together.
