Nehad Selaiha explores the world of writer and director who died in the Beni Sweif fire "What is a gypsy? Does anyone really know? Is he, as someone once de scribed him, A social clown who offends everybody But without him life becomes drab and colourless? No. Let me tell you: A gypsy is a heart eternally voyaging, Always shedding off the tattered remnants of yesterday In order to clear a new blood passage between its shores. He is a flying foot Which draws with the light ness of the seagull A simple map Of a self-renewing memory, unbounded by false time." From Excerpts from the Gypsy's Divan, by As I was leaving the Supreme Council of Culture in the Opera grounds one afternoon in early September, 2001, the year the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre honoured Eugenio Barba, I saw standing outside in the sun, deep in conversation with that great Italian director, theatre theoretician and founder of the famous Odin Teatret in Denmark. It was obvious both had skipped that day's long and boring session of the central CIFET seminar and I envied them. As I made my way towards them to taunt them about their truancy, I remember thinking how lucky Barba could speak Russian, since Saleh had done his doctorate in theatre in St Petersburg. I also remember registering with some surprise that, but for the colours, they were dressed exactly alike -- in jeans and sandals, with embroidered, buttonless waistcoats on top of their shirts. Only Saleh, as usual, had that heavy, bulging satchel of his slung over his shoulder. He was never seen without it, and it gave him the air of a restless wanderer or a homeless person. Sometimes I would quiz him about the 'treasures' it contained, suggesting that, besides papers, manuscripts and books, there were probably wads of Kuwaiti Dinars and a change of underwear, just in case. Though Saleh had spent some years in Kuwait as a visiting lecturer at the theatre institute there, he was always hard up for cash; his passionate, impulsive nature and weakness for women had landed him with three costly divorces, four children to support and chronic financial problems. To my teasing about the bag he would just grin and jocularly repeat: "all my worldly goods." But it seems it was no joke. In his confessional, reflective diary, Days of The Last Exile, published in 1999, he says: "On this hot, sticky, hellish morning, damned with the curse of the divine sun, I strap my heavy bag to my shoulder and set out, with all the bran that has remained of the year's harvest in it, to look for a modestly-priced place to house the kids and am immediately set upon and juggled around by property brokers." But back to that afternoon in September. When I asked Saleh and Eugenio what they planned to do with themselves until performances began in the evening, Eugenio said with evident excitement: "he is taking me to see the gypsies." "What gypsies?" I asked, turning to Saleh. "I didn't think any were still around," I said. "Of course they are," retorted Saleh, adding with a mischievous grin; "you are looking at one of them." It was the first time I hear of it and though surprised, I felt it made a lot of sense and explained a great deal about Saleh -- his ardent spontaneity and restlessness; his wary, suspicious uneasiness in the presence of authority; his furious impatience with bourgeois morality and traditional social codes and restraints and the sense of being an outsider, never at home anywhere, which dogged him throughout his life. The word gypsy had featured in the titles of both his first collection of poetry, Maqati' Min Diwan Al-Ghagari (Excerpts from the Gypsy's Divan , 1995) and in the subtitle of Ayyam Al-Ghurba Al-Akhira (Days of the Last Exile), which went: Three Texts from the Gypsy's Divan. At the time, however, I had not read them, not even heard about them, and Saleh was either too modest to mention them, or, perhaps, too courteous to embarrass me by revealing my ignorance. How I wish he had done; I would have loved to discover the poet in him while he still lived. I had known him since the mid-1980s solely as a poet of the theatre -- a gifted, experimental director who occasionally wrote his own scripts. He had joined the Mass Culture Organisation (now Cultural Palaces) in 1983, and one of his earliest productions there was a memorable epic play inspired by Bertolt Brecht's famous article A Street Scene and carrying the same title. Curiously, like Barba, Saleh had not studied theatre regularly before he started making it (which Barba would tell you is a great blessing and leaves you free of clichés and rigid ideas), and had only worked with amateurs. More to the point, making theatre his profession had never crossed his mind before he joined university. If he thought of himself at all at the time, it was as a budding poet. At midnight, on 31 December, 1990, in St Petersburg, Saleh described in his diary, among other things, the sense of loss and utter lack of purpose he had felt when faced with the choice of college and career. His father was partly responsible for this negative state of mind and the feelings of inadequacy and doubt. He was a hard, domineering man who married three women in succession, producing 13 sons and one daughter and bequeathing to some of them the curse of apoplexy and to the others different forms of neurosis. To the young Saleh, he appeared as both a fearful enigma and a terrifying giant, always angry at something and never smiling except when smoking in the company of his cronies ( Days, p.129). No wonder the child "felt like a quarry dogged by others, particularly his family and relatives". The terror he imbibed in his childhood was probably behind another confession he makes in Days ; in it he says: "Ever since I was a child, I have felt a barrier between myself and the world. It has often seemed to me like a blind, amorphous mass which sometimes would take the shape of some monstrous, mythical, savage creature about to devour me. But whatever the shape it took, it always had the same distinctive smell." Was it the smell of his father? His mother was the exact opposite and he adored her, referring to her in Days as "that wonderful child/woman whom I was destined to love in secret when I realised she was my mother, nursemaid and nanny." (A trace of an Oedipus complex there?) In an earlier paragraph he describes his birth in mythical terms, denying his father any part in his making, and dwelling on his mother's gypsy origins. "According to documents," he writes, "1956 was the year of my last birth as a person in my present form and features. Before that I was a spirit in the shape of a bird, or so I like to imagine. But the bird was destined to metamorphose into a man by falling lovingly into the womb of a child/woman -- one of the gypsies who lived in the Lahoon area, on the borders between Fayoum and Beni Sweif, before they moved to the edge of the western desert and settled on the shores of Lake Qarun. Later on, her father and his brothers decided to move to Cairo and live on its outskirts, eventually merging and melting into it." Another patriarchal figure looms in Days as a debilitating force. From the age of five and until 1967, Saleh lived on "legends and daydreams -- all about heroism and all centering on one miraculous person -- Nasser, or 'Papa Gamal'," as he was taught to call him at school. Saleh was barely 11 when his great hero suddenly collapsed and "the warm tent of the dream was mercilessly rent, leaving us all out in the cold" ( Days, p.32). The bitter taste of defeat and feeling of betrayal remained with Saleh, infecting his life, and were exacerbated by Sadat's policies after 1973, particularly his animosity to the left and economic open-door policy which spawned a lot of corruption and seriously upset the social balance. For Saleh, his generation, as he says in an undated entry entitled "A Dream" in Days, was "the generation of silence... who arrived too late, when everything had been said and all meanings exhausted"; all they could do was "to bear witness to the death of art and philosophy and the final death of this old universe." They "had lost the virginal innocence of the word" and were treated like "whores on the market of a corrupt world which respects nothing because nothing can equal its filth." The anger continued to simmer, but in the absence of faith and hope, and when it could find no outlet in theatre, it often turned upon its bearer, plunging him into depression. "In the years that followed the death of 'the man of destiny'," Saleh says in the St Petersburg entry on the last day of 1990, "I had to start thinking of a career, but I had neither the patience nor courage to explore my real potentials and inclinations. I could not, for instance, decide which college suited me and kept vacillating between several military colleges and the faculty of commerce," which he finally joined, almost "by pure chance", as he confesses. He spent the years at university reading a great deal, writing some love poetry and mingling with members of the political left; "but I didn't really know what I wanted." It was also during those years that he "stumbled into the thorny world of theatre" when one day "fate put in my way a group of theatre amateurs who rehearsed in the basement of a cultural palace in Garden City. Suddenly, without prior warning, I found myself one of them." He continued to work with this group and others after getting his B.Com. in 1979, and by 1983 had become sufficiently recognised as a promising director to be appointed in this capacity at the Mass Culture Organisation. And now that he had become a professional director, Saleh set about educating himself artistically and theatrically, first joining the Institute of Arts Criticism at the Academy of Arts for a year, then completing a two-year diploma programme at the Folk Arts Institute at the same academy. As his horizons expanded, his experimental drive grew; the Mass Culture theatre sector, however, with its notorious, endemic bureaucracy and anaemic budgets, could not accommodate all his projects, and so, in 1986, he founded Al-Suradiq (The Marquee) -- a vibrant and exciting independent theatre troupe for which he wrote and successfully directed some plays, drawing on folk stories and legends for material, and on the traditions of popular comedy, indigenous festive celebrations and folk rituals for form. But this measure of independence was not enough to appease the restlessness of the gypsy in him or his thirst for knowledge and, within less than two years, he managed, through his own efforts, to get a personal scholarship to study theatre in Russia, at the St Petersburg Institute for Theatre, Music, and Cinema. Back with a doctorate in 1992, he resumed work in the Cultural Palaces theatres and soon found himself in charge of their major Cairo troupe. The actors there still remember how he hated being called Dr Saleh. In 1993, his first book on theatre, Metaphysics of Kinesics: Studies in Expression through Dance and Movement, appeared and was followed in 1994 by an Arabic version of his PhD thesis, Traditions of Popular Comedy. Between that time and the end of the century, Saleh seemed to be constantly hopping between Egypt and Kuwait. He hated to be away from Egypt, whether the exile was St Petersburg or Kuwait. In Days he calls the former "the city of devils" and the latter, "the city of the dead". But though his life in Egypt was never peaceful or easy (his diary speaks of profound loneliness and a terrible sense of alienation), he bitterly resented having to keep going back to Kuwait where students didn't care two pins about theatre and academic life was riddled with mean rivalries and sordid conspiracies. But he had no choice; the demands on his purse were constantly increasing, and in Egypt, making theatre, even brilliant theatre, in cultural homes and palaces, or independently on the fringe, brings in little cash; he was probably sending money to his Russian ex-wife who had stayed behind with their son and supporting two growing girls from another marriage. And as if that wasn't enough, he went and married a third time, hoping it would be the last. Within seven months he was divorced, having fathered another girl. But the time he spent in Kuwait was not a total waste; it resulted in another book, The Duality of Self and Other in the Art of Acting, which was published there in 2001, and allowed him to prepare the material for Against Theatre: A Diary of Al-Suradiq Theatrical Experiment, which I have yet to see. But this deep involvement in theatre-making and research did not keep Saleh away from writing or poetry. Indeed, nothing could, even though writing did not come easy and made him suffer. On the back cover of Days, he describes himself as a person "who has the curse of writing upon him" and is condemned to write himself and the world into existence. His imagination, not reality, generated his experience "so that he no longer saw people and things except as they appeared to him imaginatively in writing." Saleh was honest enough to admit how painful and destructive this could be to others. "As he continued to write," the back cover tells us, "the line of victims he left behind him, kept growing...People who entered his life and left without ever knowing how they got in or why they were thrown out." But in this game, as in "the old theatrical game of illusion," the writer is also at risk: "if the stories he makes get jumbled, he will not know what is happening; and if he finds himself in reality the protagonist in several stories running simultaneously, he will be lost." While theatre for Saleh was a mask, a way to escape the self, writing was a kind of compulsive striptease act. To a friend, he wrote: "If you ask me why I write, I will say: for no reason at all, except writing itself -- an awesome task if you only knew. But I want to write, even if it costs me my blood and freedom. This writing of disorder and confusion will reveal to you a lot of what goes on in here, inside me, in the smouldering darkness of my hidden self -- the self of an oriental man who refuses to let the world see his existential anxiety." Theatre was different: "He who makes theatre his profession," he warns, "must realise that he will live an exile from his true self all his life; for theatre is an objective, communal art and will remain so no matter how much of his soul the artist pours into it." In both cases, however, the artistic experience is very similar: "Like the madman, the writer, or artist in general is a person who opts out of the social context; the only difference is that the artist does it, willfully, consciously. Both are exiled from society by some hidden, implicit social contract intent on preserving a set of rules and established structures." These do not normally allow the public airing of new ideas or unfamiliar images, regarding those who think them up as dangerous, subversive elements. "This view of the artist brings him very close to the vagabonds and clever adventurers in our Arabic heritage and extends to poets, eccentrics, non-conformists and everyone who rebels against the tribe's traditions and way of life." One way of beating society at its hypocritical game, Saleh believed, was clowning -- "not cheap, physical clowning... but a kind of profound, bitter clowning which pierces through what is material, physical and external to reach the spiritual core inside and arouse genuine human joy -- a joy that can make you smile and also cry." One could describe Saleh himself as a very philosophical clown who always hid his suffering under the mask of comedy. As a poet, has yet to be discovered and evaluated. His first collection Excerpts went unnoticed, and his second, and last, Al-'Awda Min Nuzha Layliya (Back from a Night Stroll), appeared in print only a weak or two before his death. In his diary, he quotes Byron, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Mahmoud Darwish, Jibran Khalil Jibran and Baudelaire. Of the list, the last two names stand out as a major influence. "Two poets have spoilt my life," he says in Days "Jibran who early in my life stamped me with his idealism so that it lurks behind the apparent bleakness of my writing, though many people fail to notice it, and Baudelaire, whose Fleurs du Mal gave me the first whiff of the sweet smell of sin. While Jibran nurtured the longings of the soul, teaching it to flow and fly beyond the suffocating constraints of daily reality, Baudelaire traced for my body the landmarks of the road to damnation." On 10 October this year, would have been 49. On that day, despite his absence, his mother, three lovely girls and two beautiful ex- wives gathered, with many of his friends and colleagues, at the Russian Cultural Centre to mark the occasion. After a couple of honourary speeches and some songs on the lute by Mohamed Izzat, songs that Saleh loved, his daughters and ex-wife Nora Amin, herself a gifted writer, actress and director, took turns reading some of his poems. On the stage, Nora had prominently placed a framed picture of Saleh on a metal stand. When she read the last poem in Back from a Night Stroll, called "The Frame," it was eerie, as if Saleh had known he was going to die and meant this last poem as his epitaph. As Nora read, Saleh's picture seemed to come alive and recite with her: "This is me at last, here and now... An empty frame with images rushing through it... Fluid and roaring... Bits of my life, my moments... Scattered and mixed... And swept by the tide of time to the universal ocean... To the gate of nothingness. This is me at last, here and now... My mother's frame... She looks into it, smiles contentedly And hands it to my father... He hangs it on a dilapidated wall Indifferently. An empty frame... Just a frame Through which the days have projected images... It is here, now, among you, But without me... Myself."
