The preoccupation with "new writing" has trickled over into the Supreme Council for Culture. Amina Elbendary and Youssef Rakha attended a conference and talked to novelist Edwar El-Kharrat, its organiser Click to view caption Even a cursory reading of literary magazines (a soon-to-be-extinct species, perhaps) suggests that something new is emerging. While those of an extreme, postmodernist persuasion are quick to lament (or celebrate) the death of writing and the writer, more and more people are publishing literature of every kind. As the economic recession rages on and readers have an ever smaller disposable income, others are investing money in books (and bookshops, see across). So what is going on? Is there something, anything going on? Are the new novels published through the 1990s "new"? What about the dozen or so published within the last six months? Do these creative endeavours amount to a distinct movement? Is there a "fictional explosion" as the Cairo weekly Akhbar Al-Adab seems to argue? And finally, is this a true sign of health, or is it a treacherous false alarm, an apparent remission in a nonetheless fatal illness? As such melodramatic questions loom -- on the pages of newspapers and magazines, in the halls and corridors of cultural establishments, at coffeeshops and in long phone calls exchanged between the literati -- other discussions are taking place. Again championed by the editors of Akhbar Al-Adab , critics and commentators have undertaken a re- assessment of the contribution of those elusive "Sixties writers" -- a generation at once praised and blamed for the state of the culture in Egypt. And so it seems, at times, that in opposition to this generation of writers, who having started out as avant- garde, experimentalist and even revolutionary are now unequivocally "establishment," is a rising generation of new writers -- an opposition most often expressed, sadly, in the simplistic terms of us versus them. It was therefore fitting, if not inevitable, that a conference should be held at the Supreme Council of Culture (SCC), the current bastion of Egyptian literature, managed, significantly, by pillars of the Sixties. So, Saturday to Monday, writers and critics met at the SCC headquarters in Gezira to discuss "The Writings of Young Story Tellers." Organised by novelist and critic Edwar El-Kharrat, who chairs the Fiction Committee of the SCC, the event brought together writers from different generations, the SCC once more demonstrating eagerness to bring the young and the new within its folds, so that alongside established writers and critics -- Kharrat, Ibrahim Aslan and Ibrahim Fathi -- were also such names as Muntassir El-Qaffash, Yasser Abdel-Latif, Mustafa Zekri, Nora Amin, Bahaa Abdel-Meguid, Hamdi Abu Golail etc. The mood, though altogether encouraging, was not without unease: people were communicative and receptive but the newness of what they were about made them nervous and tense. During the opening session, dedicated to the distinctive characteristics of new writing, Hamed Abu Ahmed, for one, seemed to dismiss the majority of this work as either unworthy of publication or unfinished, thus questioning the discretion of the critics supportive of the current scene. Anybody with some cash or access to funding can publish a novel, Abu Ahmed claimed. Only a select few are worthy of commentary, he argued. Unlike much of what is now published, their narratives -- the worthy ones -- manage to bring forth whole and deep human experiences, a form of knowledge that is indicative of life's contradictions and fluctuations. In a similar vein Mohamed Abul-Atta argued that language did not develop significantly in the new writers' work. On the whole, he insisted, a sense of place -- a significant locus for narrative in Sixties' writing -- is absent. In the new writing place, and even time, are grey and nondescript entities. There is no such thing as a story in the traditional sense, and the writers' concept of time, far from being linear or even coherent, is in fact completely arbitrary. Most of these writers are young, very young, and so lack the life experiences that make up the writer's raw material. This they make up for through the agency of their imagination, turning reality into something unrealistic and, by implication, contrived. Another defining characteristic of these new writings is that they are influenced by cinema and the visual arts, which affect both the structure and surface of the text. When critic Ibrahim Fathi jumped to the defence of the young the hall burst into flames. No place? No time? What Fathi was implying in his rebuttal is that, rather than negating place and time, the young simply perceive them differently. Place is no longer the nation, in fact the writer perceives and experiences the world through the body; and human action is undertaken through the body, which remains an inseparable aspect of the space-time continuum. Temporal discontinuity, Fathi argued, has roots in as old a source as Alf Layla wa Layla. As a tool it merely takes on new meanings regarding man's position vis-a-vis the multifold pains of globalisation. Critic Shaaban Youssef added that place is not simply about geography; time too is a place and both are present in the work of new writers. He gave the example of Mai El-Telmessani's novel Heliopolis : here the author discusses the life of a particular family in a particular building within a particular neighbourhood of Cairo, Heliopolis, limiting herself to a specific time frame (the 1950s to the 1990s). Place is equally prominent in Khaled Ismail's Gharb Al-Nil (West of the Nile), Youssef added. Ismail delves into the most parochial details of the Egyptian south to make statements about the general human condition. Others pointed to Alaa El- Aswani's 'Imarat Yacqoubian (The Yacqoubian Building), which traces historical developments in modern Egypt through the lives of the inhabitants of one building. It was cheering to witness critcs like Fathi and El- Kharrat defending the new. This should never imply that celebrating young literature is merely a function of its newness, nonetheless. In fact "the novel and the story have never flourished as they have now," El-Kharrat asserted emphatically, with a twinkle in his eyes, sitting in the busy corridors of the SCC while waiting for the last session to commence. This seemed to be the main impetus behind the seminar, which aimed to "present and circulate the ideas of young creative writers," as El-Kharrat explained, "about their writings and their opinions of cultural life and art in general. There was a feeling that they do not receive sufficient attention and so this seminar highlights their writing. It is the first seminar dedicated to young writing. The initiative came from the Fiction Committee and from [SCC head] Gaber Asfour..." What came out of the seminar, in the end? El-Kharrat was expansive: "Well, during the seminar the dominant idea has been that there is no single, undifferentiated entity that could be called new writing. When you think about the new writers of novels and stories, rather, it is self-evident that each has his own characteristics and techniques and abilities. But in my opinion and that of many others, this doesn't mean that there are no characteristics common to their writings though characteristics do not automatically mean they should be pigeon-holed together. These were important points of discussion at the seminar." "The issue of generations has been raised often, obviously there is a logical problem in the classification of writers by decade of their appearance, and talk of a Sixties generation and a Nineties generation is rather pointless. But it is my feeling and that of others is that this doesn't mean that there are no literary movements. The writers of the Sixties form a movement, or a trend, and this applies to other movements as well. I think we can say that the new writing is a movement even if its writers don't make up a 'generation' as such." And as a contribution, is this movement worthy of praise? "I find it magnificent. Of course I don't have a preconceived evaluation that everything that is new is better or vice versa; or indeed that what is past is beautiful. There are many important innovations, significant and even excellent adventures. And these were the subject of fruitful studies and discussions during the seminar, especially of books published recently. There is, I believe, a development, a growth, in the general cultural-literary arena. The general historical, social and political conditions may have led to it, but there is no automatic or direct link between social movements and literary movements; each has its own rules. "The studies presented at the seminar emphasised that these writings are not identical and that each writer has his own individual characteristics. In my opinion those characteristics common to them include a general tendency to rebel against authority, be it political or social, the authority of the text, sacred or otherwise, and the authority of theory. There is a rebellion against literary genres, for example. Some speakers pointed out that many such writings lack a distinct or definite identity; and in many recent novels what you get is a nameless, undefined protaganist (or narrator), though of course there are characters with names and defining characteristics too. There is also a sense of alienation, of being on the run, and of exile in many of these works. These are general characteristics that we can deduce from a variety of writings." But are these new writers more conscious of their individuality as writers? Is the supremacy of the self or ego a defining characteristic of their work? "What we aimed to discuss during one session was how those writers perceived their writing, what they wanted from it, how conscious they are of their role as writers. But what happened was that most of the speakers focused on the consciousness and identity of the characters in the novels and stories, rather than the consciousness of the writer, and so we didn't come out with a definite conclusion. But the contemporary writer feels marginalised, no doubt. Most writers, if not all, feel excluded and that they have no role. It is this that leads to the characteristics we've discussed; the feelings of exile and alienation. As for the problems of the readership, they have to do with the whole cultural and social environment and with the growth and dominance of the visual media which tends to marginalise high culture. Not that high culture is necessarily rigid and austere, on the contrary, it could be very enjoyable indeed. But television and the new media ignore it in favour of entertainment and people 'wanting to have fun.' This is a problem that begins from school and extends to the press and the media." Finally, since El-Kharrat rejects the classification of writers by age, or decades, does he regard his own recently published novel, Tariq Al-Nisr (The Eagle's Path) as "new writing"? Characteristically, he defects. "A writer of a previous generation could write something more novel and adventurous than a young writer, and a young writer may well produce something traditional and rigid. The seminar's aim was to get acquainted with the intellectual and spiritual mood of these new writers. And I do believe the novel and the story have never flourished as they have now, in terms of standard and everything. No, nothing, nobody has died. The writer is alive and kicking."
