Mubarirat shakhsiyya (Personal Reasons), Yasser Ibrahim, Cairo: Merit for Publications, 2005. pp231 Yasser Ibrahim's second novel, Mubarirat shakhsiyya (Personal Reasons), is a significant addition to the body of novels produced by the so-called generation of the nineties, a loose group of younger Egyptian writers, and it manifests some of the movement's most salient features both thematically and technically. Thematically, the novel presents an anti-hero, a recurrent feature of novels by these writers. Typically such an anti- hero is not the disillusioned intellectual of the sixties generations, someone frustrated by his inability to lead the people to political action. Rather, he is an outcast, someone who rejects society and / or is in turn rejected and banished by it. Omar Farouk, the main character and narrator of Ibrahim's novel, is a perfect example of an anti-hero of this type. The reader discovers little about him, aside from the fact that he is divorced from his wife, but what stays in the mind is Farouk's hostility to all kinds of authority, including to the authority of the hospital milieu in which the novel is set. Technically, it shows the kind of interest in formal experiment that has characterised the whole generation-of- the-nineties movement. Mubarirat shakhsiyya might be taken as author Ibrahim's comment on what is here described as contemporary, "neo-colonial" Egypt and the new business class that controls it. It tells of a meeting between Farouk and Ihab, both graduates of the Faculty of Commerce, both divorced, and now both in their mid thirties. Ihab has cancer, and he is living out the last days of his life. He registers with an organisation that assists dying patients desiring company, helping them to "display" themselves to those among the healthy who wish to witness death. Farouk, penniless and unemployed, is given the opportunity to witness Ihab's death in this way through the offices of Nesreen, a rich businesswoman, with whom he is having an affair. However, the two men draw close to each other in unexpected ways, Ihab telling Farouk of his marriage to Nour, their life together, their son Ziad, how they became increasingly distant, and his failed attempt to stave off divorce. Ihab also recounts his experience of a career working in a bank, mentioning his colleagues, a "gang of traitors," whom he suspects of fraud and of taking bribes in managing transactions worth huge amounts of money. Central to Ihab's recollections are a three-day trip to Hurghada and an unsettling encounter while there with Kamal, who had been an activist during the 1972 wave of student demonstrations that temporarily took over Tahrir Square in Cairo. Following these events, Kamal had found himself with no role to play, and he had become engrossed in his own affairs, feeling bitter about lost hopes and about his lost political role. Always carrying a camera with him wherever he goes, Kamal, out of place in tourist Hurghada as much as he is in "neo-colonial" Cairo, takes photographs of the "scenes he thought he should have been a part of," such as those taking place in Ihab's apparently happy family. Kamal, however, is also greatly at odds with the role of the spectator that Farouk exemplifies. He cannot accept such a role, and he secretly aspires to regain his lost role as an activist, as someone who wants to change the world. For all that, the world portrayed in Mubarirat shakhsiyya seems to be one that is beyond change and that may have reached a point of no return. This is a world that cannot be amended, a world of viewers, of people whose only chance of participation is to assume the role of distant spectators who, each for his or her own personal reasons, unflinchingly witness the last minutes before death, their own, as well as that of others. Omar Farouk, despite the religious connotations of his name (being that of the Second Guided Caliph), is the perfect such viewer. Watching Ihab die, he feels no emotional involvement and no human sympathy. Instead, he is a simple spectator, someone whose primary concern is to follow his own interests and to interact with others, if at all, only in the way that one might watch a television "show." For this reason, Farouk is genuinely upset when, coming back one morning, he does not find Ihab in his room in intensive care, since to him this is a violation of the rules of the game. Being denied the chance to see the "end of the show" disrupts Farouk's viewing pleasure, as well as, more dangerously, forcing him to rely on his own imagination and not to feed it with the suffering of others. Farouk does not wish to do this: he lives in a world of images that he wishes to experience only passively through visual means. Aside from these thematic concerns, Mubarirat shakhsiyya experiments with narrative in ways familiar from the work of the generation of the nineties. In Ibrahim's first novel, "The Joy of Blindness," he had played with the possibilities offered by the use of an unreliable narrator, and he continues such experiment here. While in the earlier novel Ibrahim had employed the kind of omniscient narrator's voice familiar from some of the novels by Naguib Mahfouz, playing with this tradition while also undermining it, in Mubarirat shakhsiyya, Farouk, who narrates the novel's three sections, is an unreliable narrator. Indeed, Farouk may be judged harshly by the reader as a kind of social pariah who feels no ties to his family or to the other people around him. While at the end of part two of the novel, for example, Farouk watches Ihab die, at the beginning of part three he is back in the hospital eager for a new show to start and angry that one is not forthcoming. The reader learns very little about Farouk himself: until the novel's final section all that is known about him is that he is divorced and that he steals expensive, imported food from supermarkets. Instead, Farouk talks about Ihab, recounting stories that the latter has apparently told him on his deathbed in a macabre replay of the Thousand and One Nights. Yet, on closer examination it seems that Farouk, seeking to escape his own subjectivity, has even been making up Ihab's stories. Why should Farouk seek to escape himself in this way, serving as the mouthpiece for another man's life? Though Ihab and his wife Nour are fully realised characters and not just types, they nevertheless also seem to belong to a world of symbols and ideas. Nour, in particular, seems to symbolise something for which Farouk is desperately seeking -- compassion -- and he becomes obsessed with women bearing this name, "the name Nour [being] a home that uncertainty hasn't taken hold of." Indeed, Farouk becomes obsessed with the idea of home and belonging, projected onto female figures, and he talks of the places in which people live, as well as of human bodies, in these terms. Both places and bodies are, however, "place[s] that [are] no longer kind to us." There may also be another "inter-textual" Nour with whom Farouk's Nour has links. In Mahfouz's 1960s novel The Thief and the Dogs, with which Mubarirat shakhsiyya is in constant dialogue, the character of the thief, Sa'id Mahran, gets out of jail only to face denial by his daughter and betrayal by his ex-wife. However, he is assisted by a prostitute, Nour, who offers him a home to hide in. Even this seems to have become impossible in the world of Mubarirat shakhsiyya : Omar, unlike Sa'id, does not have thoughts of revenge, does not mull over his past, and rather than an actor he has become a simple spectator, enjoying without reflecting on the affairs of the present. Finally, death offers one way out, and, though not felt as tragic, it does at least bring this world of shows and viewers to a close. Indeed, in this novel death is just another simple fact in a "third-rate world," and one which, not unlike Ihab, is itself stretched out to die in front of ranks of cold-hearted viewers watching with varying degrees of detachment. By Wael Ashry
