Last week at the headquarters of her new Cairo publishers, Dar Al-Ain,
Mansoura Ez-Eldin read from and signed copies of her second novel, Wara'
Al-Firdaws (Beyond Paradise), a sort of psychological thriller and
Bildungsroman rolled into one. Comparing the new book to Maryam's Maze, her
2004 novel, translated by Paul Starkey, Youssef Rakha spoke to Ez Eldin about
her work, her life and the overlap between the two.
Youssef Rakha
Though she published only three books in nearly a decade, Mansoura Ez-Eldin
(b. 22 March 1976) has maintained a high profile on the literary scene since
she graduated from Cairo University in 1998. She is the books editor at the
most popular cultural weekly in the country, Akhbar Al-Adab, where she got a
job in the same year. By 2001, though already married to a fellow young writer
whom she also met there, her first book, a collection of short stories titled
Daw' Muhtazz (Trembling Light), was published to acclaim from a battalion of
former teachers, mentors and admirers, including well-known figures like critic
Mohammad Badawi, novelist Gamal El-Ghitani (the editor of Akhbar Al-Adab ),
even the late philosopher Mahmoud Amin El-Alim. In the next two years Ez Eldin
would go through both pregnancy-birth and the death and dying of her mother,
experiences she would lugubriously internalize and eventually, from 2002 to
2009, transform. Working every day, however little the time left her after both
job and small family are paid their dues, she draws up character sketches,
composes dream studies, and occasionally develops a text into a short story --
which she might subsequently use as a chapter in a novel.
Correspondences are frequent and at least once, in the course of writing
Maryam's Maze, Ez-Eldin had all but given up on resolving one particular
complication when she realized that one of her early short stories provided her
with exactly the narrative development she needed; she simply had to insert
that short story unaltered for the novel, apparently unrelated, to flow exactly
as she had envisaged it. Correspondences could also occur between literature
and life, in equally unexpected ways. Ez-Eldin recounts that, during her
mother's last days at the hospital, the woman "to whom I owe absolutely
everything" often asked about her writing. "The idea of me writing
pleased her," and so, despite the mayhem that consciously prevented her
from doing it, at the hospital she would take out her old notes and exercises
and pretend to be working on those texts that had made her mother proud of her
when they appeared in well-known newspapers and magazines. "After a while
I realized that these short stories were actually developing into Maryam."
The slim volume, which makes up in intensity for what it lacks in extent,
concerns a young woman, her close friend or double, and the large house of a
provincial patriarch which, following the young woman's move to Cairo, appears
to her as a Labyrinth, its large and deeply intermingled cast of occupants --
ghosts, dream figures, real people? -- constituting a sort of Minotaur of the
mind. And so there seems to be yet a third level of correspondence:
paradoxically, while she consciously rejected myth, justifying Maryam's visions
with recourse to psychology, Ez-Eldin was in fact producing a grassroots
version of one of the world's best celebrated myths, and feminizing its hero.
Whatever else you say about it -- and Wara' Al-Firdaws could conceivably
make you say something different – Ez Eldin's writing emerges out of a place
both mysterious and dark. For seven years now, while advancing her journalistic
career and creating a home life sufficiently different from her family
background for her to be at peace with, Ez Eldin has also been working through
"existential questions, anxiety, discomfort, fear" -- personality
traits, she says, that have been with her at least since the unexpected,
seemingly absurd death of her father when she was aged nine (which also
explains her reading Camus and other adult books at an extremely early age).
"They are basically to do with the idea of death," these questions,
"the idea of dissolution, breakdown. Not breakdown in the psychological
sense, but the idea of this human constitution being on the verge of ceasing,
at any moment. Termination," she muses. "The whole thing coming to an
abrupt end. A somewhat strange imagination," she interrupts herself to
chuckle. And it is at this point, no matter how much I object that her
imagination is actually in no way strange, that Ez-Eldin and her work finally
come together for me. I have known her for many years and she has never struck
me as capable of anything more disturbing than a whimper. Of all the fiction
writers and poets who emerged in the 1990s, she comes across as perhaps the
most psychologically balanced -- quiet, hardworking, focused. There is a kind
of no- nonsense conservatism about her, a kind of respectability. This might
explain the fact that, from an early age until eight years ago, she wore hijab
-- a fact she seldom mentions, and then only to say that it was an outward
shift to do with her pilgrim's progress from the countryside to the city, not
with the substance of her relationship to God.
This, on the one hand; and on the other hand, her work: Never mind that
the very premise of the Maze is a dream in which the protagonist seems to be
knifed to death by her Doppelganger: a weird rite in which the latter dies
equally graphically. In Wara' Al-Firdaws a similar duo, Salma and Gamila, play
out a puzzling relationship implying anything from schizophrenia in one or both
of them to lesbianism; frighteningly rather than bafflingly, the precise nature
of their connection is never stated. Aside from the two of them, however, there
is at least one gory death, a series of encounters with the ghost of the dead
man (notably sexual encounters with his as yet young attractive wife), and
beatings. Despite her attempt to depict a whole world, her conscious marginalization
of Salma and Gamila, the sense of mystery, of the paranormal, of unaccountable
powers interfering with irrational drives, is still there. Ez-Eldin tells me
that Badawi, whose lectures she attended at the time, coined a term for her
earliest short stories: "writing the secret" ( kitabat al-sirr ).
Each text seems to be a secret, a clockwork mini information system that,
however multifarious, remains self-contained. Ez-Eldin mentions, in this
context, her debt to the horror film and her interest in the therapeutic effect
of writing (Salma, who edits short stories for publication in a newspaper,
starts writing a novel on the advice of her psychiatrist); she identifies
imagination with fear. This is not every day, realistic fear, which -- in line
with the impression Ez-Eldin gives of herself -- seems to be well under
control. The fear that is at odds with Ez-Eldin's poise, which nonetheless
comes through with amazing intensity in her books, is something far more
primal. In her mind, she explains, fear of the dark (the childhood experience
par excellence) takes on the deepest metaphysical dimensions. "You'd be surprised,"
she says, "how basic my fears are."
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Set against the backdrop of the shifting fortunes of the brick making
industry in the Delta in the mid-1980s -- perhaps the first mention in
contemporary Arabic literature of the otherwise oft-cited phenomenon of tagrif,
which eroded agricultural land before the shift to concrete -- Wara' Al-Firdaws
draws a much sharper distinction between the two settings informing Ez-Eldin's
experience. First, there is the tiny village where, in the absence of basic
public amenities, Ez-Eldin enjoyed a nonetheless unusually prosperous
upbringing as the spoilt but remarkably successful school child at the heart of
an extended family so large and close knit, so conservative and so rich that
her husband, on first being introduced to it, could not help comparing it to
the mob in The Godfather. Secondly, there is Cairo, the infinitely larger place
to which Ez-Eldin's passage -- a hitherto unthinkable breach of tradition
facilitated by her mother -- gradually allows for a clear perspective on
"just how strange and unusual this experience of the countryside really
was". The book began as an account of her mother's life, a fictionalized
biography not unlike Hanan Al-Shaykh's Hikayati Sharh Yatoul (My Life, A Long
Story) -- whose publication in 2005 discouraged Ez-Eldin from doing the same
thing again -- so she quickly gave up on this side of what she was already
envisaging as a larger, intergenerational variation on Maryam, one that
replaced the paranormal with "the mythology of the setting" and in
which the central (dual) character had less of a role to play. "As
always," Ez-Eldin says with conviction, "the work imposed its own
logic."
Partly because it contains more comedy and juxtaposes a greater number
of stylistic registers, partly because it has a more definite social-historical
reference point, Wara' Al-Firdaws has already been hailed as more accessible
than Maryam. Aside from widening the scope of her work without making concessions
to the market, however, Ez-Eldin had no intention of compromising her notion of
what writing actually involves: a process of imagining, primarily out of that
primal fear of sudden dissolution, people and places that resemble the world
rather than referring to it per se. Here as in Maryam, consequently, almost
every character in the book is imagined. "If people back in the village
read Wara' Al-Firdaws," she insists, "no one would recognize
anyone." The process seems integral to Ez-Eldin's way of dealing with a
suffocating environment, which has been very different from straightforward
rebellion or insurgency, and reflects her view of herself not as woman writer
but as a writer who happens to be a woman. She behaves like a virus, she says,
working from the inside; she instills herself in the host -- "the
mafia" of her extended family -- precisely in order to transcend it. And
though outwardly her own life has been more or less conservative, she is
careful to point out that she instituted a nuclear family ( usrah ), not an
extended family or tribe ( 'a'ilah ). Like few writers of her generation,
rebellion and transcendence have been matters of the mind; and she still
dislikes any predetermined idea, however positive, being imposed on what she
does: the Woman, the Body, the Provinces are all candidates; she rejects them
all. At the most obvious level it is madness that she is really interested in,
(in)sanity, "but it is not as if I studied psychology or apply it in any
systematic way". Even the Novel does not bind Ez-Eldin.
It is something of a cliché by now to speak, borrowing critic Gaber
Asfour's expression, of the Age of the Novel, which has driven many an
excellent short story writer and poet to switch genres. Having published Wara'
Al-Firdaws, Ez-Eldin is -- by contrast -- in the process of
putting together a new collection of short stories. It is a form she loves, she
says, a form both difficult and rewarding, and never separate from or in
contradiction to the literary project her two novels have pursued. She has no
doubt that her readership will engage with her stories just as
enthusiastically, and though she would be hard pressed to identify this the
constituency of that readership, unlike many contemporary young writers, she
distances herself totally from the discourses and debates of sales, popularity
and what makes for a successful book. "People accuse serious writers of
obscurity," she says, "of looking down on readers. But who is to say
that readers are less intelligent or less complicated than the writers? Who is
to say that it is making assumptions about how much readers can understand that
means looking down on them?”
July 2009
Al-Ahram Weekly
