From page to stage

Nehad Selaiha is bewitched and repelled by a stage version of a popular satirical novel
Mohamed Mustagab's The Secret History of No'man Abdel- Hafiz is a curious work of fiction, at once bewildering, fascinating, repulsive and outrageously funny. Published in the mid 1970s, a period of social upheaval and ideological turmoil, it reflects the profound scepticism and great confusion of values that marked those turbulent years. Technically, it continues the modernist critique of traditional mimetic art, launched in the sixties, but in a spirit of blatant cynicism, and, using the narrative strategies characteristic of a lot of postmodernist fiction, it recklessly carries the essential ironic nature of the novel as a genre to its extreme outward limits, threatening to destroy it altogether. The content of the novel, the purported secret history of the eponymous hero, as far as one can extricate it from the baffling narrative (with its deliberate entangling of myth with history, its many digressions and asides to the reader, and constant accretion of unrelated data), is, to say the least, ludicrous and banal. It traces, with obsessive (yet, ridiculously fruitless and obfuscating) attention to detail, historical veracity, and accurate documentation, the story of the humble birth, dubious genealogy and impecunious progress through life of a wild, beggarly vagabond until his marriage, in his late teens, to a modestly well-off young country woman, with a pronounced speech defect, which (the lisp, not the betrothal) much chagrins his mother. Unless one considers as remarkable feats such deeds as stealing into farms and fields, under cover of night, to purloin fruit and poultry, climbing palm trees, jumping small canals, haring over fields and meadows, working for an undertaker and sleeping in a graveyard, wearing no underwear and sneaking furtive looks at bare female limbs left inadvertently uncovered, or acquiescing to a belated (and, as it turned out, appallingly bungled, horrifically painful, and nearly lethal) circumcision, there is nothing that remotely qualifies as heroic in No'man's life. And, there is nothing secret either, except, perhaps, for the final part of the one night he spent, at the age of nine, in the opulent bedroom and lascivious presence of a rich, elderly female paedophile, who had tricked his widowed, penurious mother into bringing him to her lair with the promise of adopting and raising him in the lap of luxury.
The stolid, pompous narrator, a scholar and academic historian who ponderously annotates his text at every step with tedious, irrelevant footnotes, inconsiderately breaks off his narrative of what happened that night at the most suspenseful point, just before the climax. He reports how the "great, venerable lady" had stripped naked, indulged in a wild, orgiastic dance, kissed, with unbridled passion, every inch of No'man's ritualistically bathed body, and frenziedly sobbed at his feet, while rolling her head on the ground. But, just as she is about to place the bare, diligently fondled body of her, by now, dazed and frantically excited child-paramour on the white, quivering flesh of her unclad, luxuriant lap, he falls silent. What happened to make the child, in the next paragraph, hare off, stark naked, out of the house and into the village alleyways, screaming in terror and pursued by howling dogs, remains a teasing mystery; and, in view of No'man's obstinate silence on the subject, the absence of other reports, reliable or otherwise, or further data, the scrupulous narrator volunteers no explanation, not even a conjecture.
The shock-effect of the episode is exacerbated by this sudden, frustrating rupture in the narrative which tantalises the imagination, opening the gates for lurid, even macabre and cannibalistic suggestions, and becomes all the more disorienting on account of the absolutely detached attitude and utterly dispassionate tone adopted by the narrator. The weird, grotesque actions of the demonic lady are related in a horrifyingly objective, matter-of-fact style, like ordinary, quotidian occurrences, or natural phenomena, released from any ethical anchorage. The narrative seems to unfold in a moral vacuum where all attempts at explanation, justification or evaluation on the basis of good and bad, right and wrong seem futile, redundant and quite absurd. Mustagab's irony is morally nihilistic, devastating and thorough, levelling everything on its way. Paradoxically, however, the absence of the traditional moral coordinates of human existence does not always result in the reduction of the characters to a subhuman species. Just as the obviously fictive and apparently factual can easily combine, figure simultaneously or become interchangeable or indistinguishable from each other if we are suddenly jolted out of our accustomed way of perceiving the world, as often happens in this work, the characters portrayed from this radically different and amoral perspective can easily transcend the level of ordinary humanity and acquire superhuman or mythical proportions.
Take the sketch of "the venerable and equally beautiful lady" who wanted to adopt No'man in the chapter the narrator dedicates to her, as its title announces. The lady in question "consists of one nose, two lips, two eyes, two eyebrows, two cheeks and a neck, followed by a chest, two breasts, a navel and two thighs -- formations which rarely exist together unimpaired in the women of the village." However, "it is believed that a number of men, not many, have met with arbitrary ends soon after discovering the difference between the composition of the honourable lady's body and that of other women." But Fawqiya, who prefers to relax in a bath tub full of milk, sleeps naked in the sun on her belly, frequents graveyards after dark and dances to the tunes of a gypsy rababa-player (who, for some unknown reason, has aged prematurely and suffers from a crippling mysterious disease in his "lower half"), has other assets besides beauty. Generous, erudite and fond of company, she entertains the local intellectuals in her literary salon and regales them with learned talk, erotic anecdotes, salacious witticisms, the choicest of victuals and the best arak in the province. "She lost her father in a much publicised murder, then her second husband, then her third, who kicked the bucket while nestling between the thighs of a demented woman. No definite news of her first spouse -- only rumours. Some say he was struck dumb at the sight of some scandalous deeds under his roof and became a recluse; others, that he was murdered by his wife's third husband, or, according to another tale, became a wandering dervish who travels around in sackcloth."
Other characters and events are similarly mythologised, particularly, No'man's father who has a chapter to himself, and is alternately presented as a holy man, a chicken thief, a profligate idler and home- deserter, and the episode of No'man's own circumcision which develops into a grotesque, mock- pilgrimage between holy shrines, nearly triggering a civil war between two villages and ending with the mutilated, bleeding male organ swelling between its owner's legs out of all credible human proportions. Like the ghastly experience in Fawqiya's den, this harrowing episode is carefully described (sparing no gory details), but with the same curious detachment of a scientific observer. In no other way could we, as readers, tolerate it. The fact that we do, and even manage to laugh at the slapstick brawling of the two barber-surgeons of the rival villages over who should have the honour of circumcising No'man and at other absurd details, is a tribute to the craft of the author. The cunning, dramatic method of narration he has contrived, and realised through the fictional figure of a scholarly narrator, who delivers the story in the form of an academic thesis, researching the history of a popular hero, acted as a buffer between the reader and the senseless, sordid, brutal and chaotic pageant that passes for reality in the novel. But the devices which distance the readers from Mustagab's mock- hero and his world do not bring them any closer to his narrator. Indeed, he is often experienced as an irritating, intrusive presence -- a pedantic, muddleheaded, loquacious professor, thoroughly incompetent at his job. Not only is he prone to frequent short circuits and sudden power failures, but he displays a pathological predilection for dwelling on irrelevancies and seems unwittingly intent on driving the reader to distraction, trying to pick up and tie the loose ends he blithely leaves trailing behind him.
It is the narrator and his miserable failure to deliver a coherent reading of history despite his scrupulous research, rather than the mock-Sira hero, No'man, and his elusive history, that are the focus of the novel and the butt of its trouncing satire. Mustagab's message is simply a negation, a drastic refutation of the old big narratives, the fictitious ideological constructs that claimed to make sense of reality and possess the truth, and the smugly confident worldview which generated them. In the topsy-turvydom of values, experienced by Mustagab's generation, reality has become relative, obscure and uncertain -- a hazy text which raises and foregrounds the question of authorship, exposes its conventions in the act of using them and incorporates a multiplicity of alternative narrative lines, all equally valid or invalid, with no possibility of ranking them in any order of value or authenticity. Like Ionesco's dumb orator in The Chairs, hired by the aged protagonist to tell his tale to the world and deliver his message after his death, Mustagab's narrator, though glib of tongue, has no tale to tell and no message to deliver.
With a novel like that, where the very act of narration is the subject and the form is the meaning, indeed, the be-all and end-all of the work, it seems sheer, suicidal folly to think of transferring it to the stage. But who could restrain Bahig Ismail once he had taken the idea into his head? He was obviously haunted by the novel and, being a gifted playwright, wanted to exorcise it the only way he knew how. The result was not a dramatisation, but a parallel text which attempts to reconstruct the secret history of No'man through a different, simpler and, perhaps, wiser narrator -- in this case, a popular story-teller, with the experience of all the siras behind him. The new narrator, firmly planted in the present, expanded the temporal framework of the narrative well beyond its original scope, which ended just before the 1956 Suez war. No'man's history becomes that of Egypt, viewed from the ideological perspective of the poor and downtrodden through the ages, and his bleeding wound, which Ismail insists is still open and has not healed, is blazoned as a symbol of the continuous bleeding by the rich (the old feudal lords under the monarchy or the new ones under the republic) of the poor.
In this new, thoroughly committed reading, the characters, particularly No'man's long-suffering mother and the legendary Lady Fawqiya, are intensely charged with political implications until they light up as bright symbols -- the former of Egypt, the motherland, and the latter, of her ruthless exploiters and oppressors, whatever their guises. One must admit that the material of the original text, divorced from its form, lends itself to such simplistic, straightforward interpretation. After all, the childless, sexually voracious Fawqiya, who attempts to steal and devour No'man, belongs to the landed gentry and can pull strings in the upper echelons of power, and when, early in the novel, No'man's mother carries him to the government hospital, in the nearby town, to seek a cure for his mysterious ailment, she is rudely shooed away by the porter and denied admittance on account of her humble status and shabby appearance. One can therefore forgive such alterations, particularly as Ismail infused his script with a healthy dose of earthy jokes and bawdy humour, obliquely hinted at Fawqiya's morbid passion for the child No'man (which is all anyone could do given the watchful eye of the censor), and built up No'man's courting of his prospective, lisping bride into a delicious sequence of comical, rough-and-tumble flirtation, country-style. What I could not forgive, however, could barely stand, though I am not the least bit squeamish, was the sight of No'man's white galabiya, richly stained with the blood supposed to be streaming from his genitals. Meant to inspire our sympathy and indignation at his undeserved suffering, it was, instead, grotesque and embarrassing. Bleeding wound of Egypt or no bleeding wound of Egypt, this was simply too much. The verbal analogy, literally translated into visual fact, was strained to breaking point and turned into parody.
"Out, damned spot! Out, I say!" I kept intoning. "What, will that galabiya ne'er be clean?" I wondered. But the spot obstinately stayed for the rest of the show, overshadowing and souring everything -- the endearingly naïve set on the makeshift stage, pitched in the open courtyard of Manf hall and flanked by two real, majestic trees, the gay country airs and festive dances, the unaffected exuberance of the chorus of young peasant girls, the narrator's sturdy presence and humorous crossing in and out of the past, and Magda Munir's powerful and sympathetic performance as No'man's mother. But all the good acting in the world could not make me forget that bloody stain.
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