How easy is it to become an Arab writer? Mohamed Baraka reviews the possibilities A writer in Egypt can be among the world's most miserable creatures. Say you have completed your manuscript. Say it is as perfect as it will ever be: your bookish friends admire it and the writers you know oscillate between reluctant praise and jealous criticism. Say you have hopes of making a name for yourself. Where do you go from there? The options for publication -- barring the private sector, which with one, maybe two impossibly exclusive exceptions has virtually no interest in literature -- are state-funded schemes, and independent publishers. While having the obvious advantage of a greater print run (a minimum of 3,000 rather than the independent publishers' maximum of 1,000), the former have the equally obvious drawbacks of poor- quality printing and long queues that could leave you waiting for years. With an independent publisher, on the other hand, you have rather more control over format, proofing and timing. Once your book appears, however, neither brand of saviour will do anything at all to publicise it. The business of holding a launch or a reading, having the book reviewed in the press, advertising it on the Internet or otherwise presenting it to an increasingly non-existent readership will be left entirely up to you. So, rather than working on your next masterpiece, you will be doing the publishers' job for them. Nor are things quite so simple, alas. In balancing the pros and cons of the two aforementioned options, consider also the fact that the queue is but one aspect of a nightmarishly Kafkaesque bureaucracy that is as likely as not to censor, cut or otherwise deform your text, and will tend to pile up copies of it in some of the country's least popular bookshops; neither Madbouli nor Diwan will ever stock it. The feeling -- and it is largely justified -- is that the choice of titles is more or less completely indiscriminate. In the drive to be fair to the young, it seems, the "reading committees" like everything they get, with the result that there is far too much to publish in any given span of time, and good as well as bad writers must queue up together. An independent publisher, on the other hand, will as often as not fail to read the text before sending it to the print press. He will be sure to praise it, nonetheless, promising you a glorious literary future, only to moan about the fact that books never sell in the same breath. This, by way of preparing you for the shock of realising that, even though you have gone to a publisher with a name -- and even despite the fact that he will do nothing to publicise your work -- said publisher will neither sign a contract nor cover "the expenses" without help from the author. You must pay him a considerable sum, in other words, before your book can see the light. The saddest part of this is that it is not actually vanity publishing, merely author exploitation on the part of incompetent entrepreneurs willing to be as corrupt as their official counterparts to maintain a niche on the scene. Discouraged? Well, you haven't heard enough. With four books to his name, three of which were published by the state, poet Azmi Abdel-Wahab is relatively well-known. Yet some of his best poems were removed from their rightful collections by order of the censor within the establishment; more recently he has published them, together with new poems, with an independent publisher. "At first I rejected the idea, I withdrew my manuscript because I was in no hurry. But as I grew older I felt something had to be done. I couldn't afford the sum demanded by an independent publisher, so I agreed to remove some poems. Independent publishers have the advantage of publishing the text as it is, without alteration or cutting, but they have a small print run and are not as widely distributed, besides the fact that the money they demand is beyond most authors' means." While she was a student at the Faculty of Al-Alsson, Rania El-Rabbat's short story Fil-utubis ("On the bus") won awards within Ain Shams University and, in Spanish translation, at the Spanish Embassy and the Cervantes Institute. She was encouraged to complete a collection of short stories which she promptly submitted to the Cultural Palaces Authority, one of the Culture Ministry's many organs; the committee approved publication. El-Rabbat had to wait two years, however; and when the time finally came, the decision to publish her book was instantaneously revoked. In the interim she had tried her luck with an independent publisher, who proved indecisive; by the time she had saved the money required, a critic friend of his had read the manuscript and he suggested changes -- she gave up. Poet Sayed Rashad is one of many writers who have found employment within the establishment, and he testifies to the fact that state-run schemes are arbitrarily organised, with no standards with which to separate the wheat from the chaff; and there is so much chaff, he said, it is keeping the machinery from operating. Funding issues resulted many a book series, including the one he edits, being discontinued. "The state-run schemes issue material that is not fit for publication. The process also requires some serious filing to determine the identity of each scheme, who it addresses, in what way and what it hopes to achieve." Though he begins by reaffirming the idea that quality is the principal standard, novelist Fouad Qandil, editor of another book series, concedes that there are too many books waiting their turn. "At the start we used to publish one every week," he explained, "but that proved financially unviable, so we started publishing on a monthly basis. That too faltered. Each issue costs LE5,000-6,000, you see, and that doesn't include the salaries." Here too a shortage of funds, combined with a change in personnel, resulted in discontinuing publication some 10 months ago. Qandil insists that committee members are completely objective, pointing out that books are only rejected when they are deemed unworthy; it doesn't seem to occur to him that the establishment's standards, on the contrary, may in fact be too low. "We are very sympathetic with young writes," he says. Under the circumstances, however, one is tempted to ask, who on earth wants to be a young writer? The tremendous rise in the number of writers may simply be a function of the growth of the population as a whole, and improved literacy across society. But it remains disheartening that no dependable readership exists for literature in Egypt; writers and publishers often feel like members of a club with no relevance outside literary circles. Poet Mohamed El-Husseini, owner of the latest publishing house to appear on the scene, Dar Nefro, says the inflation has been such the average citizen can barely afford a loaf of bread, let alone a book of poetry. "Because we live in a poor country, young writers cannot be expected to make a contribution towards the publication of their works. I am trying to maintain a balance that would be fair to both the authors and the Dar, which is not to say that many [independent] publishers are little more than merchants trying to maximise their own profits." Husseini says he himself suffered as poet from the failure of independent publishers to maintain effective distribution networks. Without the benefit of a distribution infrastructure like that of Al-Ahram, for example, the process proves difficult, he says, but he now has regular connections with some eight bookshops in Cairo and is working on establishing similar links in Alexandria. He also makes sure the Dar is represented at every Arab book fair. On a similar note television journalist Khaled El-Sayed has started the Maspero Authors series, named after the location of the Radio and Television Union, which appears once a month and publishes literature as well as criticism. Working as a kind of collective, the Maspero Authors respect no censorial strictures and are open to "anything however different or dangerous". They are present on the Internet (www.geocities.com/maspero2; [email protected]) and hold regular seminars on the works published in venues like the Press Syndicate and on television. There are even plans to turn the stories published into a 30-episode television series by way of a workshop. Perhaps, with a little imagination and a little solidarity, the prospects will not be so bleak, after all.
