Calm down, Don Quixote

Raafat El-Mihi's literary debut, published recently in Paris, was banned on entry to Egypt. The event coincided with other censorial troubles. As he finds his right to self expression increasingly under siege, Youssef Rakha and Amina Elbendary meet with the enfant terrible of Egyptian cinema
Now in his sixties, Raafat El-Mihi is depressed, on the point of quitting filmmaking, and, he says, considering emigration. As the poignant narrative of this filmmaker's relationship with cinema demonstrates, the predicament is symptomatic of an entire generation of artists and incorrigible dreamers. When he entered the world of cinema in the 1970s, subsequently moving into production and direction, El-Mihi had endless faith in the possibility of change; now, it seems, he is giving in. "Nobody among us is as ingenious as Soad Hosni," the writer-director declared recently on MBC satellite television. "But we will all meet the same end." How, ran the implied question, can we escape the depression to which she ultimately succumbed?
As a filmmaker El-Mihi has been controversial, to say the least. Together with other directors of the same generation, he is often characterised as being too artistic; his own preference for fantasia is indicative of a cinema, many argue, accessible only to an elite, intellectual class. His films, furthermore, are often read as subversive, and the subsequent uproars resulted, most dramatically perhaps, in a civil suit filed against Lil-hobb Qissa Akhira (For Love, A Final Story, 1986), a film containing sex scenes that undoubtedly enraged many.
El-Mihi's films often adopt a similar gambit, tackling controversial subjects by positing them in fantastic settings. In several films he has discussed the absurdities of current moral codes; in Al-Sada Al-Rigal (The Gentlemen, 1987) the two protagonists each undergo a sex-change; in Sayyidati, Anisati (Ladies and Gentlemen, 1990) the four leading females decide to marry the same man and live together, thereby exposing the absurdity of polygamy while in Samak, Laban, Tamrhindi (Fish, Milk and Tamrhindi, 1988) the protagonists are brain washed by their enemies to prevent them from rebelling, a process that eventually leads to their deaths.
And now he has written a novel, Hurghada: Sihr Al- 'Ishq (Hurghada: Love's Magic), which has brought him once more into the spotlight, not least because it has been denied access to Egypt on the grounds that it includes explicit sex scenes and that the plot, involving Muslim-Coptic love affairs, threatens national unity. That El-Mihi opted to use the English (Hurghada) rather than the Arabic (Ghardaqa) name of the Red Sea town in his title, along with his decision to publish the novel in Paris, served only to fuel speculation over its content, which is likely, many believe, to enhance El- Mihi's reputation for controversy.
The novel is set in Hurghada and includes several love stories, the main being the ones between Sara and her husband Qadri, who dies, and Khaled, a Muslim police officer, and the Coptic Amna. The first couple are separated by death, the second by religious codes. In despair Khaled turns to his Muslim friend Zuhra, and the couple conceive a child. But Khaled eventually returns to Amna whose uncle, an American émigré, encourages the couple to marry in the United States. Consequently the elderly Amm Fanous, after giving up most of his property to the Church, decides to convert from Christianity to Islam to marry Zuhra and so provide for her baby.
El-Mihi's turn to novel writing naturally prompts questions as to whether he is now moving away from cinema to concentrate on writing, or whether Hurghada: Sihr Al-'Ishq is an isolated incident.
"There is no justification for the question," argues El-Mihi. "I feel that every citizen has the right to enter any artistic medium with the object of expressing himself in that medium, be it writing or film. Before I started writing screenplays, in fact, I wrote five or six short stories that were published. Then I discovered cinema, and I realised that it was a virgin language, as beautiful as it is pliable. I felt that the human being in me really could structure his vision in the medium of film. And as I wrote my first screenplays I loved it with a passion. People began to comment that the person behind those screenplays was in effect a filmmaker preparing films he would direct. This was like a message to me: the screenplays I wrote read like the working notes of a practising director. And I continued to write scripts until I felt I had reached the end of what I had in me to supply in this vein. My last screenplay was Ala Mann Nutliq Al-Rasas (Whom Do We Shoot At), which was released in 1975. As a screenplay writer I felt as though I had reached the end of my tether. Then I took five years off, doing nothing apart from thinking and working with the late Soad Hosni and the late Salah Jahine on Al-Mutawahisha (The Wild One, 1979), a project in which I was only the executive producer, participating in neither the screenplay nor the direction of the film. During those five years I contemplated what to do next, and in 1980 I began making the films that bear my name as director [Uyun La Tanam (Eyes That Don't Sleep); Al-Afokato (The Attorney); Lil-Hobb Qissa Akhira, Al-Sada Al-Rigal, Samak Laban Tamrhindi; Sayyidati Anisati, Alashan Rabina Yihibak, and Shurum Burum among others]. And I was happy with cinema throughout this period, feeling enthralled by it, truly enjoying what I was doing, in the sense that my position behind the camera gave me joy."
Yet even during this stage El-Mihi's involvement with cinema was not restricted to directing. A year and a half ago he leased the famous Studio Galal from the government for 20 years. Built by Ahmed Galal, generally acknowledged as one of the founders of Egyptian cinema, the studio had been nationalised and, in the hands of government institutions, fell prey to neglect and a state of total disrepair. Since acquiring the lease El-Mihi has practically built a new studio in its place. Given such a recent, and major commitment to the processes of filmmaking, how can it be that this lengthy love affair with the medium seems to be waning?
"It is the accumulation of trouble that brought on this change of heart, the feeling that I was a kind of Don Quixote, forever battling with the holding company, with the banks, with the censors, battles, battles, pointless battles with all kinds of forces. I felt suffocated. The sole motivation behind all my activities had been to realise a dream, the dream being a film that has not been made, the dream being the studio where we are now speaking.
"When we first came to Studio Galal there was nothing but rubble, the place was virtually nonexistent. I have acquired the right to renovate and use the studio for 20 years: in itself this has cost over LE5 million in bank loans. But it's been turned into a pearl, hasn't it? I don't suppose you saw the old Studio Galal, but when the architect who designed all this first came here nearly two years ago the first thing he did was build a toilet, because there was no toilet: he had to build himself one before he could begin spending time in the place, working 24 hours a day. Such were the conditions of Studio Galal. So when the work was completed it felt like a major achievement, and fellow artists were grateful. The studio has since been party to successful films, and nobody can deny that this is a form of struggle on my part: building this setup from scratch, turning the ground- water leakage into a pool and developing, besides the inner rooms, a detachable structure of windows and archways and stairs that can be turned into virtually any set. My plan was to establish a cinema institute on the upper floor, to establish a fellowship with a respected American institution as the basis for a series of exchange programmes, so that cinema can be taught as I think it should be taught in this country. The curriculum would involve compulsory visits to the Opera House and to public and experimental theatres. This is another one of my dreams: to invest this place not only with the dignity of the filmmaking process but with the vitality that a group of film students can create; to make it a learning centre.
"But the troubles just continued, and the firebrand inside me seems to have been extinguished. Hurghada was the initial response. Now by nature I am constantly searching for expression, for myself, for the questions I might ask and ways to ask them. But now I am enjoying it less and less. And the more problems I have had to face -- many serious problems had accumulated by this time -- the more I felt as if I was squandering my time in petty disputes and ludicrous battles, that it was no longer about the joy of cinema. This was the initial motivation for re-entering the literary realm, but I determined to do so, as it were, from outside it. But I will never be subject to the same petty troubles in another field, I thought, but rather be thought an amateur writer, a citizen attempting to express himself in a novel.
"I started writing the novel three years ago, while still working in the cinema, so it did not constitute a major change in direction in itself. But already I was sensing a way out in literature. Where cinema failed, I decided, the novel might allow me to express myself. And I wrote Hurghada.
"I have a very close friend, Qusai Saleh Darwish, a widely respected journalist in his time, who opened an Arabic publishing house in Paris, Darwish Presse, and started a magazine called Cinema. He read the novel and he asked if he could use it to launch a series of novels he was to commence publishing several months ago. It was not the wrong decision to say yes, whichever way you want to look at it: he is a friend of mine and he is somebody I can trust with my work, and besides, whatever Qusay asked me, I would never deny him, such is our connection as fellow journeymen. I could not let him down. Well, he was the one who showed enthusiasm for the novel, anyway, which is how it came to be published in the first place. I had made no attempt to publish it here or elsewhere. Rather, I had turned it into a screenplay on an impulse, the screenplay was complete and I had even obtained the censor's approval. Then Qusay made his proposal.
"A novel does not come out of thin air, it comes out of a society, right? I had expected discussions, indeed, maybe a few arguments -- but never the decision to ban the novel. This coincided with the general feeling that I was under siege: my last film Alashan Rabina Yihibak (So that God May Love You) had solicited a legal suit because of the word "God" in its title, even though there are many Egyptian precedents in this regard. National television, having bought my films and broadcast them over the past two years, decided to reconsider them from the point of view of censorship. I had to write to the minister of information and inform the powers that be that I would use my right to stop the films from being broadcast if they were altered or cut or mutilated. So they, too, were effectively banned. Suddenly I felt my creative space shrinking on every side. Hurghada constituted a more crucial aspect of this conflict of interests, moreover, in that it was a book.
"First there was the crisis of [Syrian novelist Haydar Haydar's] A Banquet for Seaweed, which made me wonder why a novel, the audience for which does not exceed 2,000 or 3,000 people, could cause such an uproar. One commentator, in the course of denigrating the book's publication, claimed to be speaking for the tax- payer. But who on earth told him that the banning of books is what the tax-payer deserves or wants? To my mind it is the tax-payer's right to be exposed to as much material as possible, regardless of the quality of the work of art in question. Then there was the incident of the three General Organisation for Cultural Palaces books that were banned earlier this year, which was a travesty. On this point I had a conversation with the minister, Farouk Hosni. I told him that as creative agents we were being placed in an impossible situation, our backs to the wall. The only profitable advantage that Egypt has over its neighbours and beyond is culture, the only lucrative Egyptian exports are the film, the song and the book. By denying creative self- expression, I told the minister, Egypt is destroying a source of wealth and its only qualitative advantage, burying itself alive.
"It all started with the banning of a book by a tax inspector [Alaa Hamed's Masafa fi 'Aql Ragul (Distance in a Man's Mind)]; our respected literati abandoned him altogether because he wasn't part of the clan, he wasn't in, and he was left to confront the crisis on his own. This seemed like an obvious example of how the right to self-expression is denied even by those who continuously profess it. This right has nothing to do with the quality of the work in question or the ideology of it's creator. So it was only natural that we should reach this cul-de-sac. Hurghada is not an issue in itself but an example of a much wider trend: expression is becoming impossible. This is why, when I found out about the banning of Hurghada some three weeks before the decision was announced, I kept quiet about it. I didn't want to be counted among those who allegedly capitalise on the banning of their work for publicity. I wanted my novel to be discussed as literature, not as banned literature. There is a big difference between the two. So I said nothing until somebody told me he had read about the banning while surfing the Internet. He asked why and I told him, truly, that I didn't have a clue. I would call one office, and be told to call another department. I would call the department, and they too would tell me the case of my novel had been transferred higher, until I lost my patience and inquired of my interlocutor, 'Could you please tell me who or what it is exactly that this higher denotes?' And he responded amiably, saying that the point of these complex procedures was to obtain the approval of the highest authorities possible, so that those who were campaigning against Hurghada would not be able to ban it. Then at last I was told that it had been decided not to ban the novel, but to return it to its place of origin 'because it contains explicit sex and undermines national unity.' I asked what difference that made and he laughed as if to concede the point. That was, alas, the end of that.
"The scenes that involve sex in Hurghada are meant to bring the protagonists' love down to earth, give the abstract emotions concrete form, because in my view the erotic component of love is essential if love is to be portrayed convincingly. But be that as it may, the audience deserves to be acquainted with nudity and eroticism, which are often crucial to the success of a work of art. Commercially packaged excitement is a different thing altogether, which is why pornography is essentially boring. And as to the charge of undermining national unity, I was among the first to bring Copts back to the screen in the 1970s, when Egyptian cinema had ignored them for a long time. I shot nine full minutes of a Coptic mass in my film Sayyidati Anisati (Ladies and Gentlemen).
"Our society is made up of Muslims and Christians, and to exclude one of the two would be to offer a distorted picture. The Copt who converts to Islam in the novel is the noblest character: he does so only to save the honour of a Muslim girl, Zuhra, who became pregnant by her Muslim lover, who subsequently abandons her. This is why 75-year-old Amm Fanous tells the priest, 'Christ is in my heart.' Society is a legendary idiot, he explains, and his conversion is a necessary offering to that idiot undertaken with only a noble purpose in view. Nobody in the novel is unpleasant or evil, by the way."
Certainly, given the increasingly conservative mood that prevails, El-Mihi is not alone in feeling that he is fighting on several fronts at the same time, manically tilting, like Don Quixote, at windmills, only windmills that insist on moving. So where does one find air to breathe in such a melieu, a milieu in which those who crank the sails of the windmills insist that it is they who speak for the "masses"?
"Egypt is not merely a state, it is a nation: this is what is frequently forgotten. No totalitarian or extremist system can ever survive here for very long, so in the long term there is nothing to be scared of. Nobody should have to make concessions or sacrifice the right to breathe. The state's only way of dealing with fundamentalist forces is to control the security dimension, ignoring the media and cultural dimensions of the issue. Media and culture, moreover, are incompatible disciplines: the former is what the government wants to say to the people; the latter is a creative endeavour that involves self expression and confrontation. In the time of Nasser, fundamentalists spoke of 'socialism in Islam' and similar formulas as a way of bridging the gap between themselves and the progressive majority; now it is artists and proponents of culture who have to be apologetic, because the state-controlled media, under which culture is erroneously subsumed, are avoiding a confrontation. As a guest lecturer at a girl's college I recently discovered that the majority of students knew nothing of opera or ballet or the arts. One girl stood up and said that I was talking about strange things, that her colleagues and she were required to return to their dorms by 9pm and that their outings were few and far between. I took a look at the girls' teachers, sitting next to each other in the first row. And I told the student who addressed me that she must blame her teachers, they alone are responsible for her ignorance of the most vital dimensions of life.
"Silence is a crime, whether you're facing official or civil agencies. Most of my troubles with censorship, in fact, were instigated by civil agencies; Hurghada is the first work of mine to be banned by the government. And I will sue, I will not let it pass. I will sue, I will continue to speak out. I will continue to fight back."
But in this fighting back is an intellectual abandoned, essentially fighting on his own, much like Don Quixote?
"I couldn't possibly say that fellow artists failed to support me during the current crisis, even though fewer gatherings have been witnessed in recent times. A long time ago, when I was sent to the Vice Police thanks to Lil-Hobb Qissa Akhira (For Love a Final Story) 400 artists assembled in my defence. This may well happen again now, yes, but I am exhausted and I doubt if I will resist the way I did then. In the present situation I haven't encouraged anyone to express support for me, because I don't want to turn Hurghada into an issue. So my colleagues haven't failed me, no. I couldn't possibly say that they let me down. Rather, I have increasingly distanced myself. The state of depression I've been in might help explain this attitude somewhat. I have already declared my intention to stop working in the cinema. I have decided to sell everything -- my negatives, this studio and the rights to my work -- and start anew. I don't know what I will do. At present I am writing another novel, really enjoying writing it; it is called Al-Gamila Hatman Tuhibuni (The Beautiful Woman Undoubtedly Loves Me), and am finding an outlet in literature.
"Writing a novel, one isn't as enslaved by the whims of irrelevant people the way one is making a film. Maybe I will just enjoy myself and be selfish, maybe I will leave the country, maybe I will start another career. I don't know what I will do, but I feel I've had enough of this struggle. All I ever wanted was to realise a simple dream, but at my age I no longer feel like being humiliated. Soad Hosni's death was a moment of illumination. I felt I wasn't as much of a genius as she and that her end, or something similar, would happen to me if I continued, doggedly, to waste my remaining years in this field of endeavour. It was the nadir of my depression, maybe because I enjoyed such a close relationship with her. If this woman could receive such bad treatment, I felt, then everything is wrong, everyone is stupid and there is no hope."
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