Mahmoud
Abdelshakour*
The “Emerald
Mountain” by Mansoura Ez Eldin
represents a huge leap in the author’s path. She is a special voice among the
most outstanding voices in the art of narration. While “Maryam’s Maze” and
“Beyond Paradise” were more about the inner world of the psyche, with the heroines
settling accounts with the mysteries of the heart and the wounds of the past, Emerald
Mountain not just opens up to the magical worlds of Thousand and One
Night or its unbound fantasies. The novel carries the heroines from their narrow
environment, small memories, and limited mazes to philosophical, existential
and Sufi ideas as big as the universe and kingdoms. Even the central ideas in
the amazing and complex novel (despite its simple narrative appearance) as the
flying, leaving, deserting and the parallel worlds transcending time, makes
this a deeply intense experience, unprecedented in Mansoura Ez Eldin’s former
work. It is more than the lure to be inspired by a modern Thousand and One
Night. It is a very ambitious attempt to pose questions on the meaning of
art, the ability to tell about resurrection, to exceed the story to the meaning
of its signs and symbols. Narrating here almost turns into an incantation for
resurrection, a formula through which the heroines discover themselves then the
world. The Emerald Mountain could be considered a huge metaphor not only
for the collection of the fragments of Princess Zomorroda’s story; it is also a
metaphor for the collection process of the foreseeing heroines that transcends
their trivial worries. The novel is in fact not more than an attempt to look
from above like a majestic mountain for a clearer and deeper picture into the
human experience as a whole.
This does not
mean that the Emerald Mountain is a break with Mansoura’s former works.
The world of dreams, madness and suicide represent an escape and emancipation
from reality. The characters are still tied in mysterious ropes of fate.
However one might say that escape in the Emerald Mountain is towards the
outside not the inside even if in this flight there is a more complex maze that
leads to alienation as that the dwellers of the Mountain Qaf suffer from. At the
heart of the meaning in the novel is the idea of resurrection with all its
variations, and this sufi believe in the ability to reach your destination, and
this idea of religious-mythology that gives the word ability to resurrect,
recreate and transform (in the beginning was the word) as if the human being
takes some of the ability of the creator. This might be one of the greater
philosophical meanings of Thousand and One Night that can say that it did
not just invent its world but also invented its super human being, who
transcends time, place and its limited reality. This might be the secret of its
continuance and eternity. Reality belies the virtually indefinite human ability
and death defeats man by the most insignificant germ. Yet art and imagination, and
nothing else, are weapons of human beings in this eternal ongoing resurrection.
Man is the phoenix in Thousand and One Night. His imagination is the
invaluable emerald mountain that can return and take a new shape. The word is
the magnetic mountain that attracts meanings and makes stories of it that never
die.
Mansoura
has grasped the essence of Thousand and One Night, its significance as
an artistic amulet against death. The Emerald Mountain is dashing towards
amazing horizons with a degree of maturity and mastery that is truly
impressive. I realized that the reasoning of the “Arabian Nights” (or might it
be the law of art too) is to break traditional reasoning. It is a reference to
imagination that does not only reconstruct the broken pieces in one complete
solid piece but reforms the shape of time like clay. In Emerald Mountain,
Mansoura preserves the magical and fantastic world of Thousand and One Night,
with its absolute richness in the art of narration that has become at the hand
of Shahrazad the equivalence to life. (story-telling saved the life of
Scheherazade, as it saved the customs and traditions and the dreams of all
peoples of the world). You may even consider the modern-day priestess of white
and black called Bustan al Bahr who came from the Mountain Deylam with a sacred
mission to bring Princess Zomorroda back to life, the all-knowing heroine who
holds the rudder of narration and story-telling in the time of the emerald
mountain and in our present time, is a modern Shahrazad. Not only is she not
satisfied with the retelling of a lost story from the book of Thousand and
One Night and removing any distortion from it, but also she projects present
day questions on the story, she almost see in the art, imagination and
narration, the salvage from the frustration of crazy and loud cities.
In former times,
Zomorrods said: “The tale will bring me back and the priestess of white and
black will recollect my fragments.” So Bustan el Bahr decides to devote herself
for the resurrection of the princess of the Emerald Mountain, Mountain
Qaf where wisdom leads to understanding the self and the world. In her search,
she seeks help of ancient scripts with signs and codes. Her journey brings her
to Cairo where she meets Hadeer, the rebellious Egyptian girl in the loud riotous
and lost city, the daughter of Nadia, a beautiful lady, who’s image smiles at
her in the mirrors. Hadeer is a girl of her times. One day as she was a child
she lost her mother’s ring with an emerald stone. Bustan el Bahr and her
Iranian colleague Karim Khan are the grandchildren of the monks and the elders
of the Emerald Mountain who went into the maze and diaspora after a curse
that shook the Mountain and destroyed it, Now it is impossible to bring the
Emerald Mountain back without the help of the two grandchildren, or without the
modern Zomorroda who does not realize that she is part of an incantation for
resurrection. Mansoura draws silk lines between the heroines of a bygone myth
and the heroines of the present day. She removes the barriers between the real
and the mythical with captivating brilliance. Bustan el Bahr effortlessly tells
the story between the magnet mountain and the land of the fairies in the
mythical past. Between Shiraz, Cairo, Toronto, Innsbruck, Zacatecas, and South
Shields of today, it is the imagination that brings down the walls between the
characters and cities. It closes the gaps, it makes the present able to
resurrect the past. This is Mansoura’s greatest achievement: through the story
she proves that man of today cannot escape his mythical past. He cannot ignore
the signals, signs and fate. Without imagination his only destiny may be
madness (like the madman of the Manial district with the green eyes who
strangles himself and like the man who stands screaming in his apartment window
on Tahrir Street while passersby are bewildered). The journey not only led to bringing
back the Princess Zomorroda, her resurrection and return to the Book of Arabian
Nights without distortion but to the hovering of modern Hadeer/Zomorroda literally
above our narrow world. Hadeer becomes like a lighthouse, a feathered woman in
the Book of Arabian Nights. She discovers, and we with her, that man and his
questions and his worries are the same whether in the Emerald Mountain, in
Cairo or in Canada: his ceaseless dream of eternity, his search that never ends
for the lost paradise (a capital like Stockholm, or a mountain of emerald emerges
as a vision for a jeweller with called Blouqia, or a city who knows the
night as in the dream of Ilya the seeker for magic of another kind). The
strength of the “Emerald Mountain” lies in that the heroines, mythical
and realistic, dead and alive in one basket, woven of the dream and fantasy,
philosophy and Sufism. The novel has become like many mirrors that we see on
its pages in the past and present. Like a lake of liquid silver where the
characters do not see only themselves; they see their past, present and their
future too.
The novel continues
to be tied by two fine strings in the form of two questions that are related to
art as much as they are related to philosophy: Should the Qaf Mountain dwellers
and the Princess Zomorroda content themselves with staying isolated on their
land under the watch of the faithful serpent that carries out the inevitable destiny
that cannot be escaped. Or had the venture to be taken even if the price is death
and resurrection as a phoenix? The second string/question is: Is writing the
grave of words and the curse that leads to lying and distortion or is it also a
depository for the memory, an incantation, without which knowledge would not be
safeguarded? Mansoura’s answer to the first question is completely biased towards
the search for the absolute by exiting and venturing, even a sufi belief that
one can reach through signs and through abandoning, rising, flying and spiritual
effort. Venturing has its price, overstepping boundaries has a tax, but the
experience is worth it. Maybe for man to turn himself into a mountain to see
from above his own self, instead of being just a lonely mountain dweller.
In Mansoura’s
answer to the second question she favours the Plato’s vision in “Phaedrus
Dialogue”. He saw a distortion in writing, consistent with his philosophy that
is based on the original and the image, the substance and the fake shadow. The
elders of Mountain Qaf were in fact inclined towards writing the “history” of
Princess Zomorroda without falsification and not towards artistic “writing” about
her original story. So Mansoura completely took their side declaring war on the
falsification that was done to the story. Our extremely talented author did not
realize that she has to side with art and not history. History is interested in
the truth and what really happened, while art in its essence is nothing but the
distortion of reality and history because it goes through self. Selves even add
to it. The best example is Thousand and One Night that has gained its mythical
richness from these colourful added touches that made it rainbow-like. Even The
Emerald Mountain is in truth nothing but a creative distortion as past,
present and Arabian Nights came out of the heart of talented writer’s vision.
Thus the problem is not with writing and documenting as oral texts might be
affected by distortion. The problem is when distortion by adding the self and
imagination is lost, Art itself is lost. Plato’s vision befits a strict and
rational structure, and not one of art and imagination that works according to
totally different rules.
This is my only
observation on a great novel that does not waive to be artistically pleasing,
that doesn’t lose its idea and that glues the reader to it. Emerald Mountain does
not omit big human questions. The Emerald Mountain’s place is in your
mind, dream and aspiration to make what is beyond ability come true. The king
is not Yaqut “the king of Emerald Mountain”; it is your imagination, believe
and ability to venture and yet believe in destiny. The phoenix is nothing but a
human being who dies and comes back to life through recollection and the memory
of the grandchildren. As for the myths and stories, they are only but mirrors
and lakes of liquid silver in which we see our past, our present and our
desires and maybe our future. Is there a greater magic than to say all this in
one novel?
*Egyptian writer
and critic
“Al Ketaba”
electronic site
June 9, 2014
Translated from Arabic by: Isis Qassem
