Associated Press CAIRO: To hear Ahmed Fouad Negm talk, nothing riles Egypt s most popular poet more than President Hosni Mubarak. Compared with Mubarak, Gamal Abdel-Nasser was a prophet and Anwar Sadat was a very kind man, Negm says of the Egyptian leader s predecessors, who, between them, jailed the poet for 18 years. Abdel-Nasser owed people money when he died. Sadat also died poor because he spent all his money, says Negm, who speculates that the current government, in power since 1981, has been too busy plundering the country to bother with an aging writer. To see Negm, a visitor must climb to the roof of his five-story apartment building, up a wooden ladder and through a narrow hatch to a dun-colored shack with bright blue window frames where the 77-year-old holds court. Scrawled on one of the walls was Poetry is like a horse that freely roams the world despite the prison bars. In a tiny apartment below, Negm lives with his sixth wife and the youngest of three daughters. His flat is one of scores rented to Cairo residents made homeless by a 1992 earthquake. The streets are filled with rotting garbage in the midst of a noisy, makeshift outdoor food market. Poverty is my choice. My whole family is poor, so why should I be different? he says. I live with people, eat what they eat and am surrounded by the same pollution and garbage. Negm, his head topped with an unruly mass of silver hair, his face deeply lined by age and decades of heavy cigarette smoking, glances around at the layers of dust and debris atop the building and says he feels no gratitude to Mubarak for having left him alone these past 25 years. It means nothing because the entire country is like a prison, says Negm, wearing a traditional Egyptian robe called a galabiyah. His poetry and his deep-seated dissatisfaction speaks to growing numbers of Egyptians and their seething anger with the government s alleged corruption, heavy-handed style and broken promises of reform. Police and security agents have increasingly used violence against the small but growing cadre of pro-democracy activists who have been badly beaten, some say tortured, during and after recent peaceful street protests. Negm writes in the colloquial Arabic spoken in the Egyptian street, and his voice carries weight in a country where the educated and wealthy elite is largely isolated or co-opted by the government. While a literary icon, Negm has never strayed from his anti-establishment lifestyle and irreverence toward government authority. He saves his respect, he says, for ordinary Egyptians such as himself. We have been through 7,000 years of brutal oppression, he says. How will we come out of this dark tunnel? My money is on the Egyptian man on the street. Negm has no formal education, was once convicted and jailed for forgery and has at times earned a living as a house servant and a postal worker. He has lived what he writes about. My intellect is that of an Egyptian peasant, he told an Associated Press interviewer four years ago. It was my illiterate mother who made my intellect; she was a reservoir of folk literature and heritage. Negm s humor, coarse language and humble lifestyle have endeared him to many Egyptians, particularly when he teamed up in the 1970s and 1980s with Sheikh Imam Isa, a blind musician who played the oud, a lute-like instrument, and sang Negm s verses. The pair inspired generations of young Egyptians seeking social and political change. But the secular-minded Negm, whose verse is often littered with expletives or obscene puns, had lost some appeal as Egypt s overwhelmingly Muslim population retreated deeply into religious conservatism. A judge once told me that my poetry was crude, Negm recalled. I asked him Is it more crude than what is happening in Egypt? the judge laughed. But the poet s star status and reputation as a political warrior were revived with a satirical poem marking the recent engagement of Mubarak s youngest son, Gamal, to a woman nearly 20 years his junior. Funny and short, the poem became an instant hit among Egyptians indignant over suspected plans that would have Gamal Mubarak succeed his father, who turned 78 in May. The possible succession of the younger Mubarak is a particularly sour subject with Negm, and a sentiment that is widespread among Egyptians. It would be very bad, he told the weekly newspaper Al-Dustour in an interview. [Egypt] is not a fiefdom. It s true that [the government] has for years treated it as one, but enough ... It has been a quarter of a century. Salah Issa, who wrote a study about Negm s work, says the poet s main contribution is his ability to use verse to express the mood on Egypt s streets. His poetic vision reflects the psyche of the marginalized classes living in the city s back streets, Issa told the AP. His poetry is a unique and special phenomenon.
