Nehad Selaiha wades through fragments of memory at the Jesuit Cultural Centre in Alexandria In an article on this page, dated 11 April, 2002, I described the Jesuit Cultural Centre in Alexandria, borrowing a beautiful phrase from TS Eliot's Four Quartets, as "a place where prayer has been valid". The occasion was a performance at The Garage -- the centre's little theatre -- by the independent Alternative Theatre Group. Faust's Dreams, by Mahmoud Abu Doma, the founder, author, director and moving spirit of the group, was a curiously cryptic, pensively sceptical work, austerely frugal in words, yet visually rich and intensely evocative. As I watched the world of Goethe's "Walpurgis Night" sequence in his Faust merged with that of Beckett's nihilistic Endgame (both of which partly inspired the script), I suddenly became intensely aware of the chapel next door and beyond it the monks' cells. The combination of place and play, of the sacred and satanic, of holiness and quasi-ritualistic grotesquerie was at once frightening and epiphanic; the experience left me so profoundly shaken, like someone suddenly hauled out of a deep spiritual coma. It was as if the event was intended to reach beyond theatre and religion towards the roots of both in the human psyche. I remember wondering then how the humble brick walls of that simple structure called The Garage could prove more tolerant of difference, even iconoclastic rebellion, than the staunchest forts of theatrical art. To be performed with its integrity intact, Faust's Dreams needed the vast, enlightened tolerance of a place like the Jesuit Centre, and it is primarily in this tolerance that the holiness of the place resides. A place where prayer has been valid, I thought, could not but be a place where theatre too is valid. Last Friday, which marked the anniversary of the beginning of the five-year long association between the Jesuit Centre and the Alternative Theatre Group, I experienced once more something akin to the ecstasy I felt on that distant spring night in April three years ago. Though it was hot and sultry this time, with no rain, and the sea looking like a rumpled straw mat -- as the locals say, the colour of greyish mud, once inside the courtyard of The Garage, I felt home. I greeted the rough wooden tables scattered round the place like old friends, and the old- fashioned lanterns dotting the white-washed brick walls seemed to wink at me a silent, friendly welcome. In retrospect, I like to think that Doma's Nostalgia called for this kind of brooding, turbid weather. Whereas his Faust's Dreams had been turbulently metaphysical and convulsively grotesque, therefore needing thunderstorms and heavy showers as fitting accompaniments, his Nostalgia, woven in quieter, more stoical vein, in a spirit of near philosophical resignation, needed a quiet surface to cover up the intensity of the personal feelings underlying it. Not that Faust's Dreams or Doma's two subsequent works -- The Scent of Women (a loose reworking of Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba ) and Deep in my Heart (based on the life of August Strindberg) were not intensely personal; they were, but craftily masked, with the face of the author cunningly hidden behind the faces and stories of his fictitious characters and his monologic meditations and confessions camouflaged as soliloquies or dramatic dialogue. In Nostalgia, however, Doma dares his inherent shyness and emotional reserve and nearly throws the pretence of authorial objectivity to the four winds. His voice comes to the surface, barely disguised, as he struggles to shore up his ruins, find meaning in transience, accept death and reconstruct the past out of fragments of memory. And though what the past offers at best is a splintered vista, the journey through the shards and slivers of days gone by, though searing sometimes, is not fruitless: it recaptures some cherished images, loved faces, faint echoes, old songs, faded photographs from an old family album, intriguing vignettes of real people rendered mythical through the passage of time and the accumulation of legend, flashing sketches sparkling with cynical humour and lavender-scented, musty stories suspended between dram and reality, myth and history. As you journey with Doma through the past, you meet the expert kohl-maker and village eye-healer who turns undertaken when his business grows slack as more and more of his traditional customers turn away to doctors, and who gets the shock of his life when a corpse he is about to bury comes to life in his hands, climbs out of the grave and walks away with his clothes and shoes. You meet Hajja Awaali, the writer's great aunt, who never really made the pilgrimage to Mecca but acquired the tittle on the strength of a dram in which she saw the Prophet Mohamed offering her dates from Mecca. Hajja Awaali goes blind in childhood after the juice of an onion is squeezed into her eyes to treat an infection and spends the rest of her days a spinster, living alone in the family's old, rambling, decaying house until it finally collapses on top of her. Apart from drinking coffee all day and smoking her own hand-rolled cigarettes, she busies herself with bringing up orphan girls without ever pausing to ask whether they were Copts or Muslims, or really realising the difference between the two faiths, often hilariously muddling them together. At the time the house collapsed she had one orphan girl with her, a Copt, curiously called Faransa; and though the body of Hajja Awaali was dragged out by her seven brothers from under the rubble, the body of Faransa (or France) was never found and her ghost, therefore, continues to haunt the place even though the house has been gone for more than a hundred years. There is also Patrick Zuskend's female painter (the heroine of one of his short stories) who when told by a critic that she has great talent but no depth spends her days chasing after depth and ends up jumping out of the window in despair. Other figures and faces float up to the surface, or are fitfully evoked through their sons, music or words: the aged gatekeeper of the Russian club in Heliopolis in the 1960s who first told Doma when a schoolboy that "Gamlet" in Russian meant Hamlet, Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Nikita Khrushchev, the legendary Goha and Naguib Mahfouz, Sayed Darwish and Mohamed Abdel-Wahab, Ahmed Fouad Nigm and his blind friend and companion, Sheikh Imam, who set many of his poems to music and popularised them among university students in the 1970s, and Naguib Sorour, the gifted poet and actor who constantly dreamt of writing like Shakespeare and playing Hamlet but always ended up playing the grave-digger or Ghost on account of his unprincely features and dark complexion. Like Sorour, Omar Nigm, the last face we meet in this splendid galaxy, was also a dark, gifted poet and also died young. He was a close friend of Doma and his sudden death of a heart attack at the age of 36 ten years ago was a shattering shock to all. For Doma, however, it has remained an open wound, and the last impassioned elegy to this friend, in which the meaning of his surname, Nigm (star) is used as an emblem of his continued presence despite his absence -- an elegy which bears the title "Omar, a star that will never fade" -- was perhaps an attempt to dress this wound, to be finally reconciled with death. And it is with the memory of Omar Nigm and his words that Doma leaves us at the end. For the fist time in his writing career as dramatist, Doma uses the formula of narration in the third person and opts for colloquial Arabic; this gives his narrative a tone of confidential intimacy and allows him to explore and exploit the rich resources of the Egyptian dialect, its lively, dramatic intonation, subtle inflections, rhythmical and tonal variety, vast allusive power and immense pictorial potential. The form in which the performer becomes a narrator, speaking of absent people, perfectly suited Doma who wanted to speak about the power of absence and the deep shadows it casts on the present. Throughout the text (made up of seven short sections: a meditative, confessional opening and a lyrical elegiac coda bracketing five subtly quizzical and vigorously humorous narratives), Doma achieves an amazing balance between the sense of the evanescence of life which permeates the content of his discourse and the stunning liveliness and vitality of the words and sentences which give his memories a local habitation and a name. Like many contemporary artists East and West, Doma seems to have chosen the narrative form as an ineluctable defence strategy against the collapse of all the big narratives that had for long made up human history, given meaning to experience and claimed possession of the truth. In one of the last plays of the great Syrian dramatist Saadallah Wannus, called Drunken Days, the young hero searches for the truth about his family's tragedy and the origins of its shameful sorrow, of the dark, secret shadows which envelop his dying grandmother and silently sap her life; he meets a clown and puppeteer who tells him that truth is a fugitive thing, impossible to find -- "a needle lost in a dunghill" and wisely warns him that "there is nothing except stories". Any quest for the truth about anything or the self, about one's face or features, would only yield a narrative; a quest for the past, therefore, cannot but yield many. Each one of us, Doma seems to want to tell us in Nostalgia, is made up of fragments of stories, mysterious, teasing silhouettes and snatches of half forgotten tunes. His five stories and two lyrical pieces were, therefore, lovingly interlaced with his own favourite tunes and songs and interspersed with his own haunting video images. Doma chose to deliver his text through four narrators (Awatef Ibrahim, Khaled Raafat, Said Qabil and Mohamed Abdel-Qader) and framed them singly in four old-fashioned balconies, with long, slatted wooden shutters and decorative wrought iron fences ranged across the stage. They take turns voicing the author's reflections and telling his stories. the opening section, however, entitled "Nostalgia" sets the tone and introduces the central motifs which run through the other sections. "Nostalgia in books," one voice tells you, "means longing for the past. In reality, however, it is quite different. It means having to learn to say goodbye to the past without the past ever taking leave of you and, what is more, doing it without letting a single tear spoil the dignity and beauty of the moment of farewell." "To put it differently," another voice continues," it requires you to suffer in silence, and to love your suffering absolutely." On a screen, situated right above a brick platform intersecting the four balconies, and bearing a piano and cello with their players (the magnificent Wafiq Adli and Rami Yehya), and every now and then a singer (Mireille Banoub), a projection of an ancient, forbidding wooden door, studded with metal knobs, is replaced by a man's face. What strikes you about the image (the work of graphics artist Hebatallah Higazi) is its fluidity and hazy uncertainty: it appears, divides, dissolves, retreats into the distance, then advances to split once more and alternates with the face of a woman, going through the same sequence, with both repeatedly raising their almost transparent hands to cover their fluid, melting faces. While this is happening, another solitary figure in a balcony, hung in the darkness of the stage with no visible bearings, as if in a terrifying void, picks up the verbal thread to describe how a man one morning looked in the mirror and could not recognise his face. "He stood before the mirror, fixing his eyes on it... The image reflected there was of a different face -- the face of someone he could not recognise, someone he could not remember. Between the act of looking and the reflection there was but a moment, but one replete with all the details of his life." What we get however in the rest of this densely textured text, with its carefully chosen musical interludes, graphics and video projections, are not mundane details, but rather, in Wordsworth's words, "spots of time... passages of life in which / We have had deepest feelings;" moments that "are scattered everywhere, taking their date / From our first childhood". For the author, those moments or passages, salvaged from the ruthless stream of days and fixed for a moment, with all the faces, actions and places they embrace, are the only sustaining narratives left, and however modest, are more valid than the old, grand ones. The stories, though diverse in their characters, themes, and spatio-temporal settings, seem to cluster round the recurrent motifs of life and earth, hope and disillusionment, and in all of them the image of the artist constantly jostles against that of the grave-digger. Doma scatters his recollections of things past, the memories which alone can restore to him a sense of integral selfhood and a recognisable face, among his four narrators. In turn, each of them attempts through a story from Doma's personal past to bring back to life a loved person, a faded, perfumed image or event, to recapture what Wordsworth describes as the splendour in the grass and glory in the flower. And though the prelude which gives the whole work its name ends on a somberly ironical, self-denigrating note, telling us that "nostalgia means a bunch of beautiful flowers placed on a really cheap coffin," the act of spreading the intimate, private musings and personal reflections among those four delightful narrators, in that beguiling setting, had the effect of refracting the narrative into many colours, giving the initial faceless narrator many visages and splintering his intensely personal narrative, spreading it around us like a halo, or a shower of golden dust shot through with the colours of the rainbow.
