Thursday, August 14, 2014

Narrative as Resurrection and Memory as Eternity!


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

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