Mohammad Shoair waxes moribund It was a year of absence, perhaps the year of absence: a culture suddenly deprived of a great number of its pillars. The scholar Nassr Hamid Abu Zaid, the critic Farouk Abdel-Qadir, the poet Mohammad Afifi Matar, the graphic designer Mohieddin El-Labbad, the painter Adli Rizkallah, the novelist Edriss Ali are only the best known of those who died in the course of 2010. But it was not the simple fact of their departure that imbued the cultural atmosphere with a sense of loss. Each was a veritable school in his own right; each, even Rizkalah, produced a veritable library. But rather than illness or old age, which would be the immediate causes of their absence, they seemed to depart in protest of a country torn at its seems, as if the dreams with which they had started their careers in the 1960s were so thoroughly aborted that the world could no longer accommodate their begetters. What connects them is that they suffered various degrees of oppression. Abu Zaid returned from his exile in the Netherlands, where he spent the last 15 years of his life after Islamists threatened to separate him from his wife, straight to hospital, where he eventually went into a terminal coma. Matar had been tortured in prison for alleged membership of the Iraqi Baath Party, after openly protesting Egypt's participation in the first war on Iraq and American intervention in the region. He emerged from prison in a state of confusion, constantly repeating "It is harder than death", his famous poem about torture. Ali's last novel, The Leader Has A Haircut (about his stint in Libya) was banned a few months before his death, its publisher arrested. For the remainder of his days Ali lived in fear of arrest and torture -- so much so that he spent his nights wandering the streets of Cairo lest the dreaded Dawn Callers should arrive at his house. Nor was Labbad, who was depressed and profoundly disillusioned on his death, in a far better state. Abdel-Qadir and Rizkallah were both severely ill, but the authorities made no effort to help extend their lives by offering better treatment. Political repression and censorship in whatever form are no longer even surprising; and they certainly marked the lives of all these figures, making their absence all the more painful. And so it came to be that the banning of The Thousand and One Nights (not only a seminal but an absolutely indispensable part of the Arabic cannon) should be once again on the cards towards the middle of the year, turning into an issue of magnitude all over again. Insane as it is, it had happened once before in the mid-1980s, the banning of the book was debated and taken to the courts; and when the judge acquitted the publisher of the indecency charges leveled against him, it seemed the issue was resolved (sanely, one might add) once and for all. But no: where Egyptian culture is concerned, time moves backwards. Likewise Taha Hussein's autobiography The Days, the best loved work by the Dean of Arabic Literature, first published in 1929, which was removed from secondary school literature curricula by order of the Minister of Education after Al Azhar scholars suddenly objected to the way it depicts them. Ironically, in 1929, Al Azhar, which was the butt of Hussein's sarcasm, was an infinitely more tolerant and intellectually active place. In 2010, what is more, a large number of Egyptian writers were summarily banned from the book fairs of Kuwait and Algeria -- in the latter case due to a football scuffle. Yet the battles of the past went beyond censorship as such, with Egyptian culture coming up against the same negligence it has suffered for over 25 years. Such negligence was most spectacularly embodied in the robbing of a Van Gogh from the Mahmoud Khalil Museum , which lies across the street from the Dokky Police Station, in the middle of the day. To justify his administrative failure, the head of the Plastic Arts Department Mohsen Shaalan ludicrously declared the stolen painting to be "a piece of rubbish, of no value compared to other works by Van Gogh". As was the case when a fire broke out in the Bani Swaif Theatre five years ago, when officials stricken with fear decided to temporarily shut down all state theatres, the Ministry of Culture once again closed down all museums. The root of the issue -- incompetence leading to negligence and administrative failure -- was not addressed. And to this day the Van Gogh case, despite the amount of press it generated and the many scuffles it caused within the ministry itself, remains unresolved. It is a Kafkaesque prospect indeed. *** Light at the end of the 2010 cultural tunnel was afforded in the resurgence of the short story, which has resumed its lustre once again with major novelists returning to it. Ibrahim Aslan produced the beautiful sequence Hujratan wa Salah (Two Rooms and A Hall), Gamal El-Ghitani published Sa'at (Hours), and Mohammad El-Bisatie Nawafidh Saghirah (Small Windows). A long abandoned if exquisite genre, the short story has not undermined the predominance of the novel, which is still the alpha and the omega of literary life. The question that remains is which of the two critics is write, Gaber Asfour who says that we live in the age of the novel, or Mohammad Badawi who says that we live in the age of television narrative, the latter pointing out that novels no longer pay attention to anything but plot, abandoning their epistemological post. Perhaps, in the shadow of major prizes like the "Arabic Booker" and the almost exclusive attention paid to the novel, the reemergence of the short story as a valid object of contemplation and comment will help us arrive at an answer to this question.
