Rania Khallaf enjoys a chat and a bowl of soup with Georges Bahgory "I was curled up in a ball inside my mother's belly. I hugged my legs to my belly. My head was against my knees. My hand was lost somewhere amid my guts." Thus Georges Bahgory begins his new autobiography published last week by the AUC Press. Renowned as a caricaturist, Bahgory has mastered several other arts: he is a painter, sculptor and novelist. His latest book is an adaptation of Iqonet Faltas, or Faltas's Icon, published in Arabic in 2000 by Sharqiyat. Bahgory's Words and Paintings is short, only 100 pages, running to 13 chapters on the artist's life and some characters who influenced his development as a distinctive Coptic artist. Born in Luxor, Bahgory studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Zamalek and the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Over the last half a century his works have been exhibited in France, Egypt, the United Kingdom, Iraq, Jordan, Tunisia and Italy. "The book features my autobiography as a Coptic artist. It is a true tale of a Coptic family in modern times. It is not just recalling my memories as a child and teenager in Egypt; the book is also loaded with the harsh sarcasm of my uncle, my two brothers, and my step mother, under whom I suffered a lot. "However," he continues, "the chapters that feature my life in Paris are the most interesting, compelling parts. I have lived a whole life there, with art. "It was my dream from the time I was a student at the Faculty of Fine Arts to study art in Paris. When I was 30, I was fully involved with being a press cartoonist, and I had achieved considerable fame both at Sabah Al-Kheir and Rose El-Youssef magazines. I was worried that work as a daily cartoonist in the Egyptian press would devour the artist in me." There were no scholarships for cartoonists at the time, so Bahgory decided to grant himself a scholarship to Paris. He exploited an invitation from Hamed Abdallah at the Egyptian Cultural Centre in France to hold his first exhibition of paintings and to stay on in Paris. "My first exhibition was in 1969, at the ECC, 111 rue Saint Michael. I can still remember exhibiting 20 paintings for the first time in my wonder land." Most of the paintings sold, enabling him to survive in Paris for another three months. "The cultural atmosphere in France was booming with upheaval after the 1968 student revolt. I started studying art again at the faculty of arts in Paris. I consider this my second birth. I was literally born twice: the first time in Bahgora, the village near Luxor, and the second time in Paris." We sit down to lunch in a modest restaurant, and Bahgory continues with his story. "In 1980, in Paris I became a different person, a different artist, surrounded by artists from all over the world and by new sentiments and emotions that I had never experienced before. My vision, my artistic tools, and even my language were also changing. I felt I needed someone to talk to, to transfer my new emotions. So I simply bought some paper and started to write," he says, sipping tomato soup. "Feeling lonely, and yet satisfied with achieving my dream to live in Paris, had helped me to pursue writing. My autobiography is a mix of fiction and real life." How he made the shift to writing is another story: "I used to watch a programme on the French TV Channel 5 called 'Apostrophe', presented by Bernard Pivot, who invites famous novelists from around the world every Friday night. In three consecutive years I learnt a lot about plots, writing techniques, the sequence of events and development of characters. I also wrote to my friend Edward El-Kharrat asking him for advice on how to write a novel. His reply was short: 'Just be yourself. It is only your style, your spirit which will decide the construction of the novel. There is no specific recipe. Just go ahead.' "I finished the novel in just five months. For me it was as if I was painting. Novel is a painting: a series of artistic images, I was also in a hurry because of a competition for new novels announced in The Critic magazine in London, then edited by Noury El-Garrah and published by Riyad El-Rayes. Although he was a friend of mine the prize went to Salem Hemesh from Morocco and Hoda Barakat from Lebanon. It was a bit disappointing." On his next visit to Cairo in 2000 the novel, Faltas's Icon, was published by Sharqiyat and was acclaimed by critics. The English translation took some eight years to appear, and Bahgory was not pleased with it. He calls it an adaptation of the original novel. "They only took some elements of the novel and attached some portraits of mine that feature my family: Rahma, my mother; Alice, my cruel stepmother; Gamil my father," he says. "It seems that they do not recognise me as a novelist. I am a thief who jumped into the world of Novel from the window of Image Portrayal. Now novelists in Europe follow the approach of Image Portrayal, which is one of the strongest approaches in the new novel in the West." Faltas's Icon was the first of a series of other books, or icons as he likes to call them. "I have written many other texts, such as Icon of Art, But my memoirs of the press world, Icon of Paris, were published as memoirs not as novels," he admits. Bahgory has also written Bahgar fi Al-Mahgar (The Emigrating Bahgar ), which features his Paris memoirs. Most of his books were not welcomed by other novelists. "I do not understand why novelists go mad when I publish a book," he says. "For them, an artist should not practice fiction writing. This classification of artistic production is something very weird and stupid," he says, drawing a portrait of one of his fans in the restaurant. The best things about this autobiography are Bahgory's descriptions of his teen years. "I used to run away from my father's home to my aunt's, where I would stay in her garden under the guava trees waiting for one to drop." Also unforgettable is the scene in which his uncle is collecting money from the church for voluntary projects. Some of the portraits were produced especially for the book. The portraits of Faltas, Rahma and Gamil reveal different sides of the characters. Bahgory himself, however, believes that the pictures have nothing to do with the book. "The story of my life is registered in 700 sketch books. This is my real treasure. The sketches portray and translate the story of my life. And I dream that one day they will see the light," he says. Bahgory, now 76, is writing Icon of the Body, which "portrays my frequent relationships and love affairs with beautiful women in Paris." He describes it as obscene. "I don't really know whether it will see the light in Egypt. "But, what makes me feel unhappy is the reaction of intellectuals towards my writing. I don't know why they dislike my success."
