The popularity of Alaa El-Aswani's Imarat Yaqoubian (The Yaqoubian Building), now a major film starring Adel Imam and Nour El-Sherif, has spurred a cottage industry in Downtown-based fiction writing. Over the past five years a flurry of novels portraying the elusive Downtown world has found its way into print, writes Sayed Mahmoud The trend is far from new. In the 1960s and early 1970s, several writers turned their attention to the tantalising landscape of the metropolis. Jordanian novelist Ghaleb Helsa wrote about Cairo's intelligentsia. Bahaa Taher offered a glimpse of city life in Sharq Al-Nakhil (East of the Palm Trees). The same inclination is also noticeable in Mohamed El-Bussati's Layali Okhra (Other Nights) written in the late 1990s. The city described in the late 1990s, however, differs drastically from the one portrayed by the current generation. Sabri Hafez, a professor of literature at London University, notes that Cairo covers three distinct fictional spaces. One is Fatimid Cairo, brilliantly tackled by Naguib Mahfouz and Gamal El-Ghitani. Another is the Khedival Cairo, which made its debut in the late 19th century. The third is the bulging, chaotic metropolis of the last three decades, the one described in detail by architect Abu Zeid Rageh. As a mega city, Cairo is hemmed in by swathes of irregular development which serves to pose a challenge to the orderly mind. The novels of the 1990s dutifully underline the absence of reason in the city's fabric, offering either a pessimistic view of the future or an outright denial of its existence. Hafez argues that the claustrophobic texture of the mega city is what makes the novelists of the 1990s, as if to undermine the space they seek to portray, write so breathlessly, and usually in a shorter format. Examples are Mayy El-Talmasani's Doniazad and Mustafa Zikri's Al-Khawf Yaakol al-Rawh (Fear Eats the Soul). As Cairo pushes the boundaries of sensible urban growth, novelists defy the laws of narration, often tossing aside any semblance of dramatic progression. To them, even having a theme seems too much of a luxury. The new novel, says Hafez, is closer to a textual maze than a clear path of storytelling. Dina Heshmat elaborates on Hafez's assessment. In her PhD thesis-turned-book, Cairo in Modern Egyptian Literature, From a City Dream to Suburban Isolation, Heshmat compares Hamdi Abu Galil's Lusus Motaqaedun ( Retired Thieves, Merit: 2002) with Mayy Al-Talmasani's Heliopolis (Sharqiyat: 2001) and Yasser Abdel-Latif's Qanun Al-Weratha (Laws of Heredity, Merit). Noting that the difference in outlook is related to the social backgrounds of the writers, she explains that the completion of the underground metro network has turned Cairo's Downtown into a more user-friendly place for the residents of poor districts as well as the city's intellectual classes. Cafés and bars, traditionally the sanctuary for writers and their friends, feature more prominently in modern fiction than ever before. No one writes with more sense of belonging to Downtown Cairo than Alaa El-Aswani and Makkawi Said. In interviews, El-Aswani often mentions that he knew Downtown by heart as a child, when his father had a law practice on Talaat Harb Street. During his later work as a dentist, El-Aswani cultivated a lifestyle that enabled him to offer a tantalising view of the city as a microcosm in Imarat Yaqoubian. Said's Taghridat Al-Bagaah ( Swan Song ; 2006), winner of the Arab Booker Prize last year, also takes place within the narrow confines of Downtown. In his portrayal of Downtown, Said offers a colourful account of the underworld with a total lack of moralising. He says that his novel "is devoid of the moral judgement that fills other novels written about the same venues". He continues his musings about the Downtown in a biweekly column running in the leftist-leaning daily Al-Badeel. In that column, he offers "the unknown oral history of Downtown, the history made by talented people tossed by life out of an imaginary paradise, by the ill-disposed and semi-insane." Said dedicates his column, entitled Moqtanayat Wust Al-Balad (Downtown Acquisitions), to the characters who had no place in his novel, thus "immortalising them by capturing the fleeting moments of the life they traverse." Unlike El-Aswani, Said does not take a stand of nostalgia. He chronicles the passage of time without holding on to a particular moment or a lost and beloved world. Hamdi El-Gazzar's Sehr Aswad ( Black Magic : 2005), which won the 2006 Sawiris Literature Award, takes an outsider's view of Downtown. El-Gazzar says that he intentionally challenged artistic tradition. "Any artistic work that is not taking place in Cairo, as a hub of events, is viewed with a bit of suspicion. It is considered an act of insurgency against the centre, shorn of focus, biased to the peripheries. This is why Cairo gets all the artistic attention, especially in novels, a bourgeois form or art par excellence... In Sehr Aswad, I did not leave Cairo, but I lingered on the peripheries of that centre, examining the powerful and yet forgotten and perplexing peripheries... Cairo is a city of intense symbols and juxtapositions, laden to the point of being unbearable. And most Egyptians don't truly own the city, aside from the small spaces that barely accommodate their daily lives." Another novel by El-Gazzar, Lazzat Sirriya ( Secret Pleasures, Al-Dar: 2008), takes us to Giza, the eastern extension of Cairo. "I tried to shift the well-established centre of fiction, inexorably connected to Cairo, and find a virgin site for my novel, a venue in which one doesn't encounter characters resuscitated from previous novels. I looked for a place where fresh characters can be launched, where a new authoritative setting can be crafted," El-Gazzar notes. In Montasser El-Qaffash's Masaalat Waqt ( A Matter of Time, Dar Al-Hilal: 2008), the main character, Abdel-Meguid, is a businessman who imports Chinese products and hires young sales representatives to distribute the merchandise across Greater Cairo. He spends much of his time contemplating a map of Cairo in his office, planning market conquests. "For Abdel-Meguid, Cairo is a battlefield minus the bloodletting. He exploits the sales representatives who have to work for him for lack of better jobs. Meanwhile, his employees dream of the day they can desert the army that Abdel-Meguid has built... For them, the city is a maze in which they are caught with no hope of redemption, with little chance of exit. In their world, the future is a mirage, a faint existence. They live one day at a time," El-Qaffash remarks. His words echo the reality of today's Cairo, where the future does not extend much beyond the working hours, where one's biggest dream is to simply get through the day. "A novelist cannot write about a city anymore, with too much certainty. You cannot portray Cairo as a place with clear-cut characteristics. The best you can do is explore, think aloud, and keep the options open, never surrendering to one-sided visions, and never turning real humans into stereotypes. It is much easier to talk about the historic sites of Cairo than about its inhabitants. Writing about Cairo's dwellers is a challenge to any novelist," El-Qaffash concludes.
