On Emerald Mountain

Translated from Arabic by: Mona Elnamoury

"My name is Bustan.  Those few who know me well call me " The Priestess of  black and white!" Others think I am weird. If a writer were to write me, he/she would describe me as the black-eyed, black- haired and black-clothed woman.. etc to the end of all the outward descriptions that cannot delve to know what is bursting inside.

No one can grasp what I hide or what I can. No one can comprehend the secrets of the original story that took place centuries ago; a tale I  have dedicated my life to. Therefore, I have to be the writer or rather the narrator that is assigned to gather the scattered parts of the tale and weave them together. It is a tale I am not the heroine of; a tale that is not without me.

In the eleventh year of the third millennium, in my flat overlooking the Nile in Zamalek, I am bent on writing restlessly.  Outside, there is an old world collapsing while I am attracted to words that keep slipping from my fingers. Like summer clouds, scenes from different eras pass my mind; I snipe some of them while others escape.

I see me as a child on the Deylam mountains in the sixties of the twentieth century. I ran behind my dad in his aimless morning walk while he recited Rumi, Hafez or Al-Attar. He would go ahead for a few meters then stop waiting patiently for me while circles of water vapor rose from his mouth.  After catching up with him, he would sit me on a stone and as usual start telling me parts of the homeland's old tale. Despite the bitter cold, warmth flew inside me and I would complete what he forgot. He would joyfully hug me.

"We are everlasting strangers" he would say every time he took out the sheets and ancient pieces of leather from his secret closet. Forgetting that I hardly talked to anyone but him, he would warn me against saying a word about them. I promised. He would start teaching me how to decipher their codes, transferring to me what his father had taught him before. That chain had to stop with me, he would say. I asked him what he meant and he would reply that his inherited signs said that I was the long- awaited for priestess. He would say no more.

This is how Mansoura Ez Eldin starts her novel "The Emerald Mountain or the Lost Tale of the Arabian Nights". In  that novel, Bustan Albahr, the mysterious narrator born on the Deylam Mountains near Alamut Castle in Iran is immersed in gathering the fragments of the lost tale of The Arabian Nights in a rebellion- drunk Cairo. It is the lost story of the mysterious Emerald Qaf Mountain surrounding Earth. The story is about the absent princess Zumurruda, king of Mountains and Jewels' burnt daughter. Once she had been burnt, the Qaf Mountain vanished and its inhabitants began a centuries-long maze as the story goes.

The reader is to discover later that Bustan descends from the lineage of the wise men of Qaf.  Mortified by prophecies in the form of mysterious poems inherited from her father who she bid farewell at the age of eighteen, she starts her journey from one city to the other gathering the fragments of the lost tale; a tale that was continuously distorted, wasted and distributed to other tales. Bustan does this because she, as well as all her ancestors, believes in the magical power of stringing one letter next to the other to regain the tale of the Absent Princess to its original place in the Arabian Nights. That action supposedly precedes the homecoming of the Absent Princess and her recreation from ashes and is to be followed by the representation of the Emerald Mountain Qaf. The mountain is to be revisited by its original inhabitants so that they can resume their lives from the same point before the princess had been burnt. In her pursuit, Zumrruda needs the help of Hadeer, the Cairean young woman who has just moved in to live with her grandmother after her mother had immigrated to Canada to live with her new husband.

In a city characterized by chaos and uncertainty, Hadeer lives her own revolution. Her life changes when she meets Kareem Khan in a trip to the Mexican city of Zakatecas.  Upon a mountain there, she goes through a strange experience where reality mixes with illusion in a way that made it difficult for her to be certain whether  it actually happened or was only the outcome of hashish. Asking Khan for an explanation the next day, she is told to look for his friend Bustan Albahr in Cairo because she has all the answers.

Meeting Bustan, Hadeer enters a mysterious world.  She works as her assistant in a research about the heroines of the Arabian Nights. In one of her visits to Bustan's house, she finds a manuscript entitled "The Girl who Lost the Emerald Ring" in Bustan's handwriting and name. She is stunned because that manuscript contains details about her and her mother that no one else knew about. Consequently, the world becomes a big pile of questions to Hadeer. Rather than decoding what happened to her on the Zakatecas Mountain, Bustan overwhelms  her with a series of mysteries.

The novel has two narrative lines with the voice of Bustan the narrator as the only connection between them. The first line takes place in 2011 following the confused Hadeer in a city rebelling against its past. The second line is centered on Qaf Mountain and the details of the lost tale of the Arabian Nights. The two lines intersect near the end of the novel.

The Emerald Mountain enganes with The Arabian Nights structurally. It proves intertextual with some of its tales  like Hasib Kareem Eldin, Sinbad, Hassan Albasry and others. The Novel also adopts some of the narrative techniques inspired by the Arabian Nights: the oral and the written intersect in a clever and sensitive way.

Moreover, the novel works on the idea of the self-reflective novel:  the consciousness of writing a novel springing from the Arabian Nights and full of the joyful fantastic.

It is worthy to say that in the Islamic culture there is a myth about The Mountain of Qaf: a huge mystical Emerald mountain surrounding the earth. This mountain inspired many Islamic Sufi thinkers and poets like Ibn Arabi and Farid al- Din al-Attar as well as international writers like Jorge Luis Borges in his short story "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim".

In The Emerald Mountain Mansoura Ez Eldin only adopts the highlights of the original myth and invents an imaginary parallel one with many unforgettable characters like Ilya, the Blind Giant seeking after the night who inhabits the Magnetic Mountain half of his life. There is also Bullukya the Traveler in search of the impossible who keeps dreaming of touching the untouchable. In addition to those, there is Morouj, the letter- weaver who plays a crucial role in the destiny of Qaf by pushing things to their end. Before all those there is Bustan Albahr, the black and white Priestess keen on mending what has been broken throughout the act of writing.

Emerald Mountain, Mansoura Ez-Eldin, Dar Altanweer- Cairo\ Beirut, 2014.

Al Siqilli Dream

Mansoura Ez-Eldin

As I left the Wehbeh building, I found myself on a dark street that bore no resemblance to Qasr Al Nil, which I knew by heart. It was winding rather than straight as I knew it to be. I walked, and as I did, I saw the street was blocked at its far end; but when I reached what I thought was a wall, I was surprised to find an opening luring me onward. The light was dim on the other side; the buildings had transformed into fortresses that hugged the curves of the road as if they had shape-shifted to fit their surroundings. A dark veil enveloped everything, and I felt I was looking at a film negative.

I continued walking as if in a dream or some filtered reality. The world around me had become a quivering mirage bathed in silence. My very thoughts seemed to turn to smoke, and I was no more than the shadow of a lost being.

I felt like I had stumbled upon a hidden, mythical corner of this city. Just when I started to feel I belonged here, I was reminded of my estrangement. I felt not fear but merely desire to understand, accompanied by a feeling of unease. I was certain this was not a dream. My anxiety strengthened this conviction. Cairo was whispering in my ear, taunting me that I would never know it, that I would live within as a transient, an eternal drunk who never sobers.

People had disappeared from the street as if a storm had blown them away. As if they never were.

“In the beginning, there were stones, and they will remain when all else has ended. The stones alone are the city’s past and its future!”

I almost said this aloud, but I didn’t. In that moment, there was neither sound nor echo, only silence. For a second, I thought even I didn’t exist, that I was merely an idea that had occurred to the road about a woman walking down it as if in a dream. But just then a question popped into my head, and I was solid and real once more: where am I, and how can I find my way back?

I quickened my pace, looking straight ahead until I got to Mostafa Kamel Square, and the city returned to normal, with its nocturnal crowds and noise and all the contradictory feelings it evokes in me. I embraced its image as a tipsy city happy to drink itself to the dregs, indifferent to the transients that tread its streets, their lives fleeting moments in a history that spans thousands of years, lording over every ancient stone and even the dust that gathers on the aging buildings and the exhaust fumes that poison the air.

I dared not look back until I reached the Abdel Moneim Riad station. There, I sat on the dirty pavement, protected by the din of commuters running to catch the microbuses, which filled with passengers as soon as they pulled in. I distracted myself by staring at the Ramses Hilton and counting the number of lit rooms. An agitated guest was throwing burning papers from the window of his room and watching them go out as they fell.

The tumult reassured me as reality regained solidity and cohesion. I left my spot on the curb and stopped the first cab to cross my path. Throughout the ride, I kept staring at the streets out the window to confirm they were as they appeared, all the while replaying in my head the last thing Adam Khalifa had said to me: “This is not a city, but a patient suffering from vertigo!”

Of all the neighborhoods in Cairo, he chose Faisal, where I lived for five years, as an example of the chaos and discord of the city’s architecture. 

I was supposed to interview him for one hour, but the meeting – which started at seven o’clock at night – went on for three, during which time Adam Khalifa did not stop speaking even for a second. I would ask him a question, but the words that rolled nonstop from his tongue had nothing to do with what I had asked. I would try to reformulate the question, and he would tell a story whose significance I could not divine although I was overcome by his proficiency, stemming from his absolute faith in his own words. After a couple of hours, he was more at ease and began speaking of “his own private Cairo,” as he put it. This was closer to what I wanted: the magazine was publishing a series of interviews under a section titled “Their City.” In each issue, a public figure would share his or her vision of Cairo and draw their own map as they had lived it since childhood. I did not put much effort into these interviews. It was just question and answer, according to my editor’s wishes. After publication, I would rewrite each one, again and again, as stories, and store them away in a secret drawer, overflowing with papers that at once resembled and contradicted the city.

As I made my way to Adam Khalifa’s office in the Wehbeh building where I was to interview him, I found myself hoping for an extraordinary journalistic encounter with an architect who had contributed to the planning of several cities. I expected him to present a different vision of Cairo, but he surprised me with a city of hallucinations and doubts. He went on at length about Cairo’s fragile relationship with reality and its solid grounding in superstition. He spoke of what he termed “Holy Muqqatam,” the wisdom of Jawhar Al Siqilli compared to the folly of Khedive Ismail, and the need to restore the city to its original design if we are to correct the mistakes of the North African astrologers who oversaw its construction. 

He told me Cairo was an enchanted city, that almost no one knew of its focal points or the hidden stashes of magical amulets buried at different sites. As he went on, I realized he was only speaking about the city built by Jawhar Al Siqilli, commander of the armies of Moaz Deenallah the Fatimid, and later expanded by Emir Bader Al Jamali. He strictly avoided mention of anything built after the fall of the Fatimids by the Ayyubids, Mamluks, or Ottomans, or the Cairo of Khedive Ismail and the neighborhoods of Masr Al Gadida or Maadi. He insisted that everything built after the Fatimids was a cancerous growth and everything before the Islamic conquest just “castles made of sand.” He said this last part in English, turning away from me.

***

Translated from the Arabic by Meris Lutz

An excerpt of my forthcoming novel "Al Siqilli Dream", to read the rest of it, please order the print edition of Portal 9.

http://www.antoineonline.com/Book_Portal_9_Stories_and_Critical_Writing_about_the__9772305519037.aspx?productCode=0009772305519037&from=504

في مواجهة الأسود الغامض

منصورة عز الدين

في رسالته الأولى عبر صفحته الرسمية علي موقع الفيسبوك، يوم 17 فبراير 2011، نصح المجلس الأعلى للقوات المسلحة المتظاهرين بعدم ارتداء الزي الأسود خلال التظاهر!

هذه النصيحة العابرة، بدت وقتها، غريبة وخارجة عن السياق بل ومضحكة. ففي ظل الاحتفالات بإسقاط مبارك والاستعداد لمليونية 18 فبراير المبتهجة، جاءت رسالة المجلس الأولى لتخبرنا، ضمن أشياء أخري، أن "حرية التظاهر حق مكفول للجميع دون اللجوء لثقافات غير مصرية لم تولد على أرض مصر مثل ارتداء الزي الأسود خلال التظاهر"!

ولمّا لم يكن للزي الأسود من دور بارز خلال الثورة، ولمّا كنا ثملين بالنجاح السريع في القضاء على رأس النظام، ومتأثرين بالتحية العسكرية التي أداها اللواء محسن الفنجري للشهداء قبلها بأيام، لم ينتبه معظمنا إلي التحذير "العطوف" من "مخاطر" اللون الأسود. 

قرأت الجملة، وقتها ضاحكةً، وتتالت على رأسي صور آباء "طيبين" يربطون الأردية السوداء بثقافة  يخافون منها. "شباب يرتدون الأسود، هم مصدر خطر ولا شك". هكذا يقول بعض الآباء لأنفسهم وهم يستحضرون أفكاراً نمطية مكرورة عن "الإيموز" وعبدة الشيطان وموسيقي "الهارد روك" و"الهيفي ميتال"، وثقافة كاملة يرون فيها تهديداً مباشراً لهم ولما ألفوه واعتادوا عليه. لكن لماذا تذّكر العسكر هذا اللون "الشرير" مع أنه لم يكن مسيطراً بشكل خاص خلال الفترة من 25 يناير إلي 11 فبراير 2011؟!

عندما أعيد قراءة هذه الرسالة الآن، بأثر رجعي، لا أجد إلاّ احتمالاً واحدا. هو أنهم يخاطبون، من بين كل الثوّار، أعضاء حركة 6 أبريل وصفحة "كلنا خالد سعيد" علي وجه التحديد.

فالدعوات لإضراب 6 أبريل 2008 طلبت من المواطنين البقاء في بيوتهم، ومن يضطر للخروج، عليه ارتداء اللون الأسود، وهو ما حدث بالفعل. في هذا اليوم كانت الشوارع شبه خاوية، وكثير ممن ذهبوا لأعمالهم اضطراراً حرصوا على ارتداء ملابس سوداء. بعدها شاع ارتداء اللون الأسود في الوقفات الاحتجاجية الصامتة حداداً على مقتل خالد سعيد وكل ضحايا التعذيب في مصر.

لكن بعيداً عمّا إذا كان من كتب هذه النصيحة يربطها بالفعل بالحركات الاحتجاجية السابقة على الثورة أم لا، فالمؤكد أنها كانت الإشارة الأولى  لوصاية أبوية حرص عليها المجلس الأعلي للقوات المسلحة في تعامله  مع الثوّار والمدنيين بشكل عام.. وصاية أتاحت له أن تأخذ سياساته في أحيان كثيرة صورة قرارات فوقية ذات اتجاه واحد.

منذ 17 فبراير إلى لحظتنا هذه، حدثت تقلبات عديدة، حوّلت النصيحة الأبوية المقنَّعة بالحنان إلي إصبع مهدِد متوعد، وحوّلت المجلس   إلي تابو لا يجوز الاقتراب منه أو التعليق عليه.  لكن تبقى حقيقة واحدة هي أن ما حدث ثورة شعبية عظيمة، أطلقت روحاً من المستحيل قهرها. ثورة لن يقبل من قاموا بها الرجوع بالزمن إلى الخلف.

نُشِرت في "أخبار الأدب" بتاريخ 23 يوليو 2011، وأعيد نشرها هنا بمناسبة الحكم القضائي بحظر حركة 6 أبريل.