Mansoura Ezzeddin, a young writer of some accomplishment and much promise, tells Rania Khallaf about her debut novel -- and the many concerns that inform it One day Mariam, a young woman, dreams that she is killed by her double. On waking she looks in the mirror: her face has changed beyond recognition. Sauntering through the house, she realizes she now lives in a flat she has never seen before. And as she begins to search for her own history, she discovers that her relations, the places in which she spent time, the answers to an infinitude of questions, have disappeared without the trace. Such is the premise of Matahat Mariam (Mariam's Maze), Mansoura Ezzeddin's first novel, published by Miret at the end of 2004. A thoroughly contemporary text that attempts to reclaim the theme of the double in an experimental context, drawing on the resonance of that theme in Muslim literature and connecting it with the physical, daily-life orientation of many Nineties writers. Death and insanity are the dominant motifs, and the former comes across as a disturbingly intimate experience. Mariam's grandmother hides the corpse of her husband, fearing that it might otherwise be mutilated; funerals make up the principal pass-time of the servant Saleh. Mariam's mother embraces her own husband for the first time since he was married to another woman after he dies; and for a long time the heroine herself is not sure if her lover Yehya is dead or alive. Thus the narrative remains framed by death, which provides not only a scaffolding for the action but the very substance of the protagonist-narrator's psyche -- until she is found dead towards the end of the book, having managed to re-enter her grandmother's palace, reaching back to her roots to obtain her release. Mariam and her double Radwa can be interpreted in many ways, Ezzeddin claims: some critics saw Mariam as a sceptre, a shadow; others thought the whole novel was the narrative of a dream. As a character Mariam is convincing but her complete ignorance of her own personal history is baffling. Yet "the novel is not realistic", as Ezzeddin insists. "I always had the intention of leaving some areas blank, hazy, giving the reader the opportunity to interpret them in his own way." Sensuality figures little in the book -- the compulsion to "write the body" notwithstanding -- and instead Ezzeddin credibly depicts two moving relationships: the marriage of Nargis and Youssef, Mariam's parents, complicated by Youssef's addiction to hashish and his decision to marry another woman; and the love affair of Mariam and Yehya, a relationship beset with uncertainty, which is the focus of the entire book. Does Ezzeddin's failure to depict the body directly reflect conservatism? "I think I dealt with this through Nargis and her relationship with her own body during pregnancy and birth," the writer responds. "Her body is one of the keys to her personality. She likes it so much she laments the changes it goes through it in the wake of Mariam's birth and eventually she hates it." Ezzeddin goes on, "One night, Nargis dreams that she's swallowing Mariam." In Mariam's case, the body is all but meaningless in light of the doubt besetting the person's existence -- with the result that it is hardly spoken of at all. Ezzeddin raises her eyebrows at this point: "Generally speaking, women's relationship with their own bodies tends to be unhealthy in Egyptian society, partly because of the oppressive tendencies of patriarchy." But this does not explain away the fact that the writer has refrained from speaking frankly about the body. She looks somewhat conservative herself, though she refuses to link her personal appearance to her work. "In the case of Mariam and Yehya, it is not sex that controls their relationship," she elaborates. "I really don't see what sex could have contributed to this novel." Published by Miret in 2001, Ezzeddin's debut, a collection of short stories entitled, A Flickering Light, likewise contains no references to sex. "At that time," she recalls, "I held the belief that female writers could write about everything, that their creativity need not have been restricted to emotions and the body. I also felt very strongly that the notion of woman's writing was, "contrived and unfair to female writers themselves, since it predetermined the kind of writing they should produce. Maybe all this drove me to depart from the presupposed female approach to literature, which implied depicting relationships physically." Instead, in the present book, Ezzeddin weaves a web of relations both within the city, where the character now lives, and back in the Delta village where her ambiguous past resides. Throughout the novel other characters remain marginal to Mariam, a strategy by which Ezzeddin wants to emphasise Mariam's uncertainty and her isolation. Unlike Jose Saramago's The Double, a recently published comic novel in which the double is but a literary device for exploring individuality and the fear an identity crises can give rise to, Matahat Mariam makes the double an end in itself. The reader is hard-pressed to find out who of the two -- Mariam or her friend Radwa -- is the real person and who is the double. "The theme of the double prevails," Ezzeddin says, "though the word double is completely avoided, because I want readers to interpret the novel according to their own cultural convictions and their own concepts." "I am interested in metaphysics," she goes on in response to a question about what inspired her to deal with this theme. "When I was ten, I learned the story of Solomon the prophet and the way he employed the djinn. I was living in a tiny village so I resorted to mythology and exoticism to expand my mental space." She implies that this too was a precedent to her interest in the theme of the double. "There were my grandparents' stories about the spirits who lived on the banks of the Nile, and my own mother used to tell me about my sister who lived underground -- she wanted to use my own naughtiness against me, my faults. It all widened the scope of my imagination and made me think of my double in another world; it paved the way for a lot of reading that I was to undertake much later -- A Thousand and One Nights, for example, which assured me that the imagination had no limits." Only one chapter of the novel is not told by Mariam. In that chapter, Radwa speaks of her aspirations and ambitions -- her desire to sabotage Mariam's life and person, how she envies Mariam and tries to destroy her self- confidence. "Though the novel is not realistic, much planning and design went into the conception of the characters. I removed a whole chapter towards the end about Mariam's grandfather, El-Tagy, an authoritative character who had built a magnificent palace in the countryside, because I wanted to make the book concise." Interestingly, complex and extensive as the novel's network of characters is, through its 127 pages the novel does not have a single word of dialogue. "The absence of dialogue was completely unintentional. I didn't want to eliminate the characters' voices," Ezzeddin says. "I was really quite astonished by the fact when I reread the novel on completing it, but it may simply be a function of the loneliness and isolation the characters suffer." Solitude is a major aspect of Ezzeddin's own predicament. Born in 1976 in a village in Gharbiya, she never lived elsewhere until enrolling at Cairo University at the age of 18; and the isolation she felt then has remained with her: "My village, Ezbet El-Sharqawi, carries the name of my mother's family. Of the area's villages, it was the nearest to the Nile. I remember a time when it was nothing but a fruit orchard; now it's a collection of brick factories, so you could say there has been a dramatic change since my childhood. I'd always had the desire to leave the village, and when I arrived in Cairo I was happy because I was one of a handful of girls who managed to break away from their families." Ezzeddin is sipping tea as she gives in to nostalgia. "It was an exciting experience. I lived all alone in a student hostel, I could choose my own lifestyle. And it was then that it first occurred to me that I'd rather stay on the margin, to observe the big bad city as a stranger and so attain a clearer perspective. It is this that has preserved the sense of wonder inside me." Ten years on, she confides, she still feels like a stranger: "I like to wander aimlessly through the streets." Unlike Ezzeddin's, Mariam's story is not clear. Why did Mariam leave her family in the village? To study? To look for something? And why is she so confused? The novel teems with exoticism: a bird nips at the fruit of a tree, turning everyone who eats the fruit of the same tree crazy; in El-Tagy's gardens there are apples trees that swallow trespassers. "Exotic stories fascinate me. Reading the Qur'an also helped enrich my imagination as well as my knowledge of the language. But I don't like pure fantasy or pure exoticism," Ezzeddin says. "Exoticism is but a tool to help you approach reality, not run away from it. In a sense, she believes the present book fits in with the detective novel genre. "My ambition in Matahat Mariam is to provoke the reader to join in the main character's attempt to find out what lies hidden behind the systematic confusion -- a way out of the labyrinth, the maze. I like detective novels myself, and I think they're among the most difficult to write, because it requires linguistic as well as dramatic precision. I hope Arab literature will take up the challenge some day. Equally, however, I'm concerned with women's status in Egyptian society," she concludes, "and the writing reflects this as much as anything. I believe that our society is held back as a whole, by illiteracy and the absence of democracy. But it's women who pay the price."
