Dreams and reality, Memory and forgetting

Zuzana Kratka reviews

Maryam’s Maze

by Mansoura Ez-Eldin

AUC Press, 2007 ISBN 978-1-84659-025-2 pbk 154pp

Maryam’s Maze is the first novel by a young Egyptian woman writer, Mansoura Ez-Eldin. Writing about the life of an individual, emotions, inner thoughts, the relation between dreams and reality and their impact on human psychology, Mansoura Ez-Eldin belongs to the generation of new Egyptian writing that tackles the issues of individualty rather than those of society as a whole, marking them out from classic Egyptian authors such as Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris or Mahmoud Taymour. Mansoura Ez-Eldin began writing short stories in newspapers and magazines before publishing her first short story collection Shaken Light (2001), and now her debut novel Maryam’s Maze (published in Arabic by Merit Publishing in 2004). Born in 1976 in a small town in the Egyptian Delta, Mansoura Ez-Eldin graduated in journalism from Cairo University in 1998 and started her career working for Egyptian TV, progressively moving into press journalism, where she presently works as Reviews Editor of the weekly Akhbar al-Adab [Literary News].

Focusing on relations between dreams and reality, on the one hand, and, on the other, memory and forgetting, with a particular focus on women, Maryam’s Maze builds on Ez-Eldin’s short story writing. Concentrating on the internal life of her heroine, Maryam, Ez-Eldin seeks to capture the feelings and experiences of a young girl unable to distinguish clearly between dream and reality and who has lost consciousness of time and space. The narrative starts with the scene of Maryam dreaming about going to El-Tagi’s palace, the place where she grew up, and feeling that there is a ghost girl, her alter ego walking beside her. When they enter the palace together, its former inhabitants appear as ghosts before they all disappear leaving nothing but blood stains behind them. The scene finishes with Maryam’s ghost-like alter ego stabbing the real Maryam, who then wakes up from this terrifying nightmare only to discover that she is no longer in the hostel where she went to bed the night before, but in a flat that belonged to her grandmother a long ago. The reader is then taken on a journey of Maryam’s sparse memories in which she attempts to re-establish her past – ‘I’m nobody,’ said Maryam, […] Maryam felt that she had been reduced to nothingness. She no longer had any physical existence to fill a space in the void. From this moment on, she had to face the world like someone experiencing life for the first time.

Interested in feminism, but also in the human body, as she acknowledged in an interview for Camden New Journal in 2006, made while on the Banipal Live UK tour, Ez-Eldin offers her readers numerous flashback insights into relationships between individuals and their bodies. Maryam’s mother Narges, for example, is described as a woman who feels she was forced to abandon her dreams and her ambitions for marriage and family life, a woman too focused on herself and in love with the body of her eighteen-year-old self, who found pregnancy [with Maryam] a painful and negative experience.Maryam’s Maze is a novel that stands out not only for its content, but also because of its structure.

Each chapter begins with fragments from the story of El-Tagi, Maryam’s ancestor who founded the family and built the palace to which most of the narrative is linked. Besides this intertextual feature, each chapter opener carries a symbol, which is then demonstrated in the narrative of the novel itself. For instance, in the sixth chapter we can find a parallel between apricot trees in El-Tagi’s garden and Maryam . . . the small trees would grow until they reached a certain stage, then stop. And we learn about Maryam’s upbringing and education, how despite being a very gifted child in science subjects, Maryam couldn’t reach minimum marks in others, and as a result had to make alternative choices in her studies and life.

The novel has now been made available to the English language readership in a remarkable translation by Paul Starkey, who is professor of Arabic at the University of Durham and translator of a number of Arabic novels into English. Starkey has also written widely on the subject of Arabic literature, most recently authoring Modern Arabic Literature (EUP, Edinburgh, 2006). Maryam’s Maze is an intriguing, intellectually challenging and yet very enjoyable piece of writing. It can be read, re-read and read again from many different angles, bringing each time new views and opening new perspectives. Highly recommended.

From Banipal 30 - Autumn\ Winter 2007.

A review of Maryam's Maze

Mansoura Ez-Eldin’s new novel, which challenges deeply held views about Middle-Eastern women, is a far cry from chick-lit, writes Mohammad Al-Urdun.

WRITING this novel left Egyp­­­tian author Man­soura Ez-Eldin wracked by doubts.

Not just because it was her first novel, but because in it she challenges some deeply held views about women.

Readers in the Middle East, she feared, weren’t completely at ease with such an unconventional novel from a woman – even in Egypt with one of the most progressive literary scenes in the region. There were still taboos.

Over the past few years Ez-Eldin has made a name for her bold, experimental writing. Since moving to Cairo from a village by the Nile, she’s been feted as one of Egypt’s fastest-­rising thirtysomething women writers. It is no surprise she’s caught the eye of several international publishers.

Yet Ez-Eldin still frets that she may have gone a step too far with Maryam’s Maze.

“Arab readers aren’t used to this style from an Arab writer – especially from a woman,” she says. “I felt like I’d committed a crime.”

As things turned out, Maryam’s Maze was praised for being “avant-garde” and “eerily gothic” and Ez-Eldin for her “fearlessness” in testing new ground.

She’s one of the women writers who have pushed themselves to the forefront in Egypt, a country rocked by western and Islamist forces, and by conflicts in Iraq and Palestine. So when they grapple with gender, sex, family and everyday life, what they produce is far from glossy chick-lit.

That’s not to say Ez-Eldin writes in overt political tones. She produces a style of her own. In Maryam’s Maze she has created a smoke-and-mirrors

psychological thriller with an eerie twist.

Maryam is a young woman who wakes to find her life turned upside down, her lover vanished and her closest friend disappeared.

Every little thing seems slightly out of place until it dawns on her that all she has left are fragments of memory to piece back to together amid a rising terror that she has gone completely mad. Whether she has remains an open question. Ez-Eldin trails a series of clues and tosses in some confounding questions: is Maryam mad, the victim of a terrifying altered re­ality or is she perhaps dead and returned as some kind of ghost to walk the streets? The questions are never quite answered.

“I love to take risks by trusting the reader to make up their own mind,” says Ez-Eldin.

The secret, she finally let on, is in the Egyptian mythology she learned at her grandmother’s knee in a tiny village by the Nile. In Maryam’s Maze she conjures a spirit-­double (known as a Qarin in Islamic folklore) which lives in the shadows of Maryam’s life, hellbent on usurping her.

She uses this device to explore metaphorically the issues of identity and memories she feels are at the heart of Middle Eastern politics in Iraq, Palestine and Egypt, where young people are torn between the West and traditional, often Islamic influences.

The cohesion and optimism of post-colonial Egypt of the 1950s and 1960s has given way to cynicism with the pro-American government of Hosni Mubarak and an identity crisis that has left people searching for a new way.

“When I began to write I was totally occupied with questions of identity, memory, the human condition and insanity,” says Ez-Eldin. “I was trying to understand how the dreams of the Nasser era became so meaningless to the new generations.”

The novel is set against the background of the patriarchal society that presses on Egyptian women. Maryam’s Maze also asks some awkward questions of the nature of the oppression.

“On many levels oppression begins in ourself. We can be our own worst oppressors,” says Ez-Eldin who insists she is not a feminist.

“To be honest, I was much more interested in human beings in general,” she says. “In many ways Maryam could be from any part of the world.”

Nonetheless, it’s the special Egyptian twist which makes this such an intriguing story and Ez-Eldin such a hot prospect.

• Maryam’s Maze.

By Mansoura Ez-Eldin. American University in Cairo Press

This review was published in Camden New Journal on May 8, 2008.