Novelist Edwar al-Kharrat pays tribute to the multi-faceted literary legacy of Badr El-Dib, who died last month For many, Badr El-Dib (1927-2005) is known primarily as a prominent journalist, a noted scholar, an astute literary critic, an adept and scrupulous translator, and one of the foremost intellectuals of this country. Few, however, are those who know him in his capacity as playwright, short story writer, and novelist; and as for texts of his such as Kitab Harf Al-Ha' (The Book of the Letter "Hha'"), Tilal min Ghoroub (Hills of Sunset), and Al-Seen wa 'l-Talsam (The Letter "S" and the Talisman), these came as a complete surprise to everyone. It was in fact only a handful of people who knew that El-Dib, virtually alone in the late 1940s, wrote texts that cannot be ascribed to any one given genre, texts that were not to be published except much later. Were these texts prose poems, philosophical reflections cast in the form of prose poems, or avant-garde fiction? Such was the sheer novelty and significance of these texts that those few friends who read them at the time failed to accord them the reception that they deserved, hence their undeniable responsibility for the fact that these works were almost lost; it was not before 40 years that a book like Kitab Harf Al-Ha', for example, was first published. El-Dib's was a thoroughly varied career. He taught drama and the history of theatre criticism, worked in the fields of documentation and bibliography at Columbia University, with UNESCO, and at the Institute of Dramatic Arts in Cairo, served as cultural consultant to Al-Gumhuriya newspaper, was the editor-in-chief of Al-Masa' newspaper, wrote studies on subjects that ranged from bibliography, indexing, history of the book, pedagogy, literary criticism, aesthetic theory to Zionism. His many literary translations include texts by Shakespeare and Chekhov. He edited and supervised the re-issuing of a number of mediaeval Arab texts such as the Rihla of Ibn Jubayr and Al-Maqrizi's Khitat. He wrote two plays, Al-Damm wa 'l-Infisal (Blood and Separation) and Marguerite Imra'a Ghariba (Marguerite: A Strange Woman). Yet his literary masterpieces are undoubtedly his superb novel Awraq Zumurruda Ayoub (The Papers of Zumurruda Ayoub) and his singular short story collection Hadith Shakhsi (Personal Conversation). His writings gave me greater insight into my own texts. I had, at one point, designated this kind of writing "meta-realism", but I now realise that the term is inadequate because it is relative to another designation. That said, perhaps the best term for writing that is situated between defined genres such as short stories, poetry, novels and reflections is "trans-generic" writing, writing that crosses and annuls boundaries. Comprising features of these genres while going beyond them, "trans-generic" writing forges for itself an integrity that challenges the touchstones of literary history. El-Dib himself has desisted, in his prefatory remarks, from commenting on issues of content and theme. If this may be taken as an invitation to us to provide an interpretation, I make no claim to be offering anything but a tentative reading here of Hills of Sunset. Taking my preliminary coordinates from the title of the book, I would suggest that the pivot of these texts is the extended metaphor of a sunset glowing with the rays of a blazing dusk, of a twilight radiant with a sun that is still intense, of an edging towards an imagined ending with hands filled with treasures that by their nature cannot be exhausted. Germinating from this central metaphorical axis are themes such as being and nothingness, art and existence, poetry in relation to the canon, the law and the truth, passion and rationality, love and knowledge -- abiding preoccupations in all that El-Dib has written. Certain passages in Hills of Sunset, those of a political nature, attest, necessarily and without an element of choice being involved, to a writer profoundly in tune with the national anguish we all experience. And there are, within the same text, passages, albeit fewer, that verge on the autobiographical in that they allow access to the self's anxieties. These, however, invariably lead beyond the self; examples here include "Presence", "Bitter Weather" and "Sabrina". But all of these writings, as El-Dib himself notes, even the more personal texts, do not constitute confessional writing: rather, they are existence stretched within your embrace. This is the essence of art and its all but unattainable aim in El-Dib's writing. Here, art is not an "expression" but "being," a conviction I share with him wholeheartedly. For El-Dib, being is an abiding obsession, one pervaded by nothingness: "the quest for perfection is the same as the quest for nothingness," in his own words. Granted, one cannot extricate from poetry -- or "trans-generic writing" -- nuggets and fragments of themes as I am doing here in what may seem like primitive fashion. But I may find some excuse in that I am introducing the reader to a textuality that may not be accessible except through such a procedure. This procedure, however, does not entail focussing on "a part of the meaning," which is of course impossible, but affords us insight into its intricacy, and allows us to construe meaning as necessarily inseparable from form. Face to face with this abiding preoccupation with nothingness, the only two viable paths are religion, on the one hand, and art and love, on the other. And it does seem to me that art and love are concordant facets of one truth of salvation. Before I leave behind the category of existence (and I use "category" in the philosophical sense) in the works of El-Dib, I would dispel any mistaken impression my words may have given of a writer in the "nihilist" or in the "absurdist" vein, both so common in the 1940s and 1950s. On the contrary, his texts celebrate existence, indeed almost worship sensuous existence. As for art, this is no less a persistent preoccupation in El-Dib's texts: there can be no perfection in art, even while its sole raison d'être is perfection. We strive, impelled by a perpetual illusion, to complement the other half (of art) with form. Then again he poses the question, as if simultaneously making an admission, "why should we not acknowledge, confess and accept the shortcomings of the mission -- that the blood of art is spilled?" But what I want to underscore in this preliminary reading is that art, for El-Dib, is essentially equated with love, that every treatment of love in his texts is a treatment of art, and that this constitutes a resolution of the dilemma of "art-half of existence" and "art-existence." Consider, for example, such texts as "The Dove's Hut" and "Cups of Meaning" which, among others, are primarily concerned with the problems of art. These are not published in the volume Damm Al-Fann Muraq (The Blood of Art is Spilled), but are part of the volume Tadribat fi 'l-Hobb (Drills in Love), in other words, not under the heading of art but under that of love: I doubt if this is a mere coincidence. This "judicious", "wise" writer adopts an altogether revolutionary position on the question of rhythm and rhyme: I have yet to see an apologia more eloquent, more uncompromising, and more to the point than the prose poems of El-Dib. The issue of the Arabic prose poem, to my knowledge, is one that has been settled in most literary circles whether in the Arab East or the West; and yet in Egypt it continues to crash against the stumbling block of traditionalism, literary conservatives being endowed with markedly loud voices insistently blared from official forums. I would again maintain that "trans-generic writing" is the more apt, since more capacious, term to describe such texts as El-Dib's. But this is not to say that his texts effect a rupture with the pre-modern literary canon either. El-Dib's allegiance to the Arab canon and tradition is firmer and more potent than that which any of the literary conservatives claim for themselves. His allegiance is vital and creative in that it keeps its eye firmly on the future even while its roots strike deep into the past. El-Dib's texts, then, belong among the Quran, the Hadith (traditions of the Prophet Mohamed and his companions), and the pre-modern canon of Arab poetry, as much as they belong among the masterpieces of world literature and philosophical thought, finding their place alongside Coleridge, Kierkegaard, Hölderlin, Rilke and The Arabian Nights. The body of texts that bear El-Dib's name is a firm structure, tempered music, a space in which to reach out to meaning and encounter meaning.
