Two authors and a press

By Youssef Rakha
Monday evening saw the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press presiding over a many-sided ceremony in which the award of the fifth Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature was announced and the master's 89th birthday (11 December) celebrated. Present were Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat, the recipient of the award, Mahfouz's wife (who cut a birthday cake at the end of the ceremony), the award committee members (whose assessment of the winning novel was summarised in a brief address by AUC professor and committee member Ferial Ghazoul), AUC Press director, Mark Linz (who mediated the proceedings), AUC President John Gerhart, and chairman of the General Egyptian Book Organisation (GEBO) Samir Sarhan.
The latter, Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni's envoy for the occasion, gave a humorous speech recounting how he had arrived 12 hours before the ceremony commenced, due to the unfortunate ministrations of an "over-enthusiastic secretary" who had mistaken eight pm for eight am. Sarhan commended the AUC Press for its "continuing and expanding commitment to bring the best of Arabic literature to the attention of the widest possible readership throughout the English-speaking world and beyond," as the news release puts it. He even admitted to being "a leeetle bit jealous" of the press's ability to "create books printed beautifully," explaining that GEBO, the intellectual quality of its publications notwithstanding, can seldom afford to publish "lavishly produced books like these." Against the backdrop of the Intifada, the ministry's unequivocally supportive presence seals an unwritten pact between the official cultural establishment and the AUC Press, inviting questions about whether the award is a right-wing, "American" injunction or the reflection of a true interest in advancing the cause of Arabic literature worldwide.
Despite rumours of a left-wing boycott led by writers Salwa Bakr and Youssef El-Qa'id in the context of solidarity with the Palestinian people -- to whose massacre by the Israeli army "America" happens to be party -- the award commanded the respect of a broad range of cultural and literary figures, many of whom are left-wing champions of the Palestinian cause: novelists Ibrahim Aslan and Bahaa Taher, who were both present, are but two obvious instances. Established by the AUC Press in 1996, in fact, the award has steadily gained in importance, edging closer and closer to the centre of the local literary scene. One may take issue with the jealousies and negative competition it has generated, but it seems far-fetched to view it as part of a (reactionary) ideological plan.
This year the Mahfouz Medal departed even further from Egypt, settling on a Lebanese writer resident in Paris, one of the Arab world's most distinctive contemporary voices. Last year's award went to Palestinian poet Mourid Al-Barghouthi for his autobiographical memoir, I Saw Ramallah. And of the previous two recipients (Algerian novelist Ahlam Mostaghanmi and veteran experimentalist Edwar El-Kharrat), only the latter was Egyptian. The rumoured discontent is therefore said to be due simply to the pro-Egyptian, anti-Arab chauvinism of shamelessly self-promoting authors.
Born in Beirut, forced out of the country by the civil war, Hoda Barakat has published three novels -- Hajar Al-Dahik (The Stones of Laughter) and Ahl Al-Hawa (Lovers) as well as the present winner Harith Al-Miyah (Ploughing Water, 1998-9) -- and one collection of short stories, Za'irat (Visitors). With the exception of the latter, all her works were written in France, are set in war-torn Beirut and are told from the viewpoint of a male protagonist. At the centre of her work lies almost always a paradox, an essential contradiction. Indeed, her unique brand of psychological thriller seems to thrive on just this kind of binary opposition: female author and male protagonist, European life and Lebanese fictional world. She probes themes of social-historical and individual disorientation and dispossession, rousing the reader to a convolutedly remembered impression of space and time -- immediate but never present. Barakat focuses on marginal characters, giving voice to an otherwise dumb predicament. Owing to her astounding command over language and the inventive games she constantly plays with it, Barakat's books are relevant on both the historical and technical levels.
Comprising the hallucinatory reminiscences of a textile merchant, Nicola Metri, in post-Civil War Beirut, the winning novel, Harith Al-Miyah recounts the family history of both Metri and Shamsa, his Kurdish maid. Judging by their statements, at least, it undoubtedly impressed the committee members. An "exploration of collective memory with a masterful command of different registers of language" (Abdel-Qadir Al-Qutt), it was thought to push "Arabic fiction to new horizons on both aesthetic and intellectual grounds" (Abdel-Moneim Tallima). In Barakat's text narration "becomes a continuous confrontation with the death of meaning in our world" (Hoda Wasfi). Yet our "new Sheherazade" nonetheless manages to spin "the universe on her narrative loom" (Ferial Ghazoul). Even for those who had not read the novel, Barakat's own characteristically unassuming participation was sufficient to excite both hearts and minds as she expressed pride in her name being associated with Mahfouz's (see sidebar).
Due to well-publicised health complications, Mahfouz himself was absent. And following a by now established tradition, an interview on video was broadcast in which Mahfouz affirmed his wholehearted support for the AUC Press in its endeavour to bring to the foreground works that have real weight but may otherwise remain unknown, setting off, in Linz's phrase, "a new beacon of Arabic literature every year."
As Gerhart explained in the course of the video, the task of the AUC is not merely to provide Egyptians and Arabs with a sound foreign-language education but to bring the Arab World to the attention of the Western public.
Translating (Arabic) literature, Gerhart asserted in his address, is one effective way of bringing two cultures in contact with each other. And it was in a spirit of intercultural contact that recent and future AUC Press publications were promoted. Following previous winners like I Saw Ramallah, Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid's No One Sleeps in Alexandria and, most recently, the late Latifa El-Zayyat's The Open Door, Harith Al-Miyah is scheduled to appear simultaneously in Cairo, New York and London early in 2001. Projects for the following years include Youssef Edris, Yehya Haqqi, Alhalm Mustaghanmi, Fouad El-Tarakli, Leila Abu-Zied and and Miral El-Tahawi.
Barakat on receiving the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature:
"Writing is neither a world we inhabit nor a beautiful object we give to our loved ones. It neither satisfies hunger nor quenches thirst. It may appear, in our harsh times, to be something unnecessary or useless, trading in delusions, a substitute for the real world.
When I was a child, my mother singled me out among my siblings with a kind of pity, as if I suffered from some hidden malady: in a soft voice she would often repeat that I was living in a fantasy world and she would shake her head rather sadly as she wiped away her tears when we had been reading together. One day, when we had finished reading Midaq Alley, she planted her finger on the cover of the book and said to me: "This is not the real world."
I knew that the book was the creation of the writer, and that it was not the real world. But this knowledge was no use to me since I did not find the world anywhere else. I became ambivalent, inhabiting the unstable borderlands. The books that I read changed me, and they raised me, like my family.
Now, when I reread the fiction I write, I feel sometimes that my characters are more real than I am: guiding me to my true self more clearly than my social behaviour in the real world.
When I telephoned my mother to tell her about your generous award I said: "My name is now connected to the writer of Midaq Alley -- do you remember? I have won a prize in his name. Perhaps now I am secure in my beautiful sojourn in the land of ambiguity."
The Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature award committee has chosen to honour me for my novel Ploughing Water. What a strange concurrence of signs. Ploughing Water: small, marginal lives in the vacuum of devastated towns that we rebuild with expired fables and delusions in place of knowledge useful only in the perdition of these lives.
It is a prize for this writing, for this generation to which I am proud to belong.
And it is an honour that my name should be attached to the name that forged for us the great way of doubt.
Thank you to Naguib Mahfouz, to the judges, to AUC Press, and to you all."
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