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
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
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
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.
Subhanallah I have seen you in a dream before
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