Die Schriftstellerin Mansura Eseddin im Gespräch: Was bleibt vom Geist der Revolte?

Die ägyptische Autorin Mansura Eseddin ist den NZZ-Lesern seit 2011 durch ihre im Feuilleton erschienenen Beiträge bekannt. Sie erzählt von verlorenen Hoffnungen und von den Gegenwelten der Phantasie.

Interview von Angela Schader

9.11.2015, 05:30 Uhr

In Ihrem Roman «Hinter dem Paradies» und noch mehr im erst ins Englische übersetzten Erstling «Maryam's Maze» sind Entfremdung, Persönlichkeitsspaltung, Selbstverlust zentrale Motive. Warum beschäftigt Sie dieses Thema so sehr?

Für mich ist das eine zutiefst persönliche Erfahrung. Ich fühlte mich immer irgendwie fehl am Platz, sogar in dem kleinen Dorf, wo ich geboren wurde. Ich hatte das Gefühl, nicht am rechten Ort, in der rechten Zeit zu sein. Schon als Kind habe ich mir Parallelwelten ausgedacht. Das hatte auch damit zu tun, dass der Tod sehr früh in mein Leben trat. Ich habe mehrere Geschwister verloren, und als ich neun war, starb mein Vater, der mir sehr nahestand. Ich konnte das nicht akzeptieren. So begann ich, mir andere Welten und andere Leben für die Angehörigen vorzustellen, die ich verloren hatte. Das entfremdete mich den Menschen noch mehr, aber es war eine Schulung für meine Phantasie.Dazu kam mit der Zeit das tiefe Unbehagen, das in Ägypten für meine Generation eine Art Grundbefindlichkeit war. Dreissig Jahre lang lebte ich unter der Herrschaft desselben Präsidenten. Das gibt einem das Gefühl, rein nichts verändern zu können; und manchmal rebelliert man, indem man sich selbst zum Aussenseiter macht. Das gibt einem zumindest die Möglichkeit einer kritischen Distanz. Eigentlich müssen alle Schriftsteller Aussenseiter sein. Wenn man zu involviert ist, wird man leicht blind – das ist mir zu Beginn der Revolution selbst passiert.

Sie haben in Ihrem Schaffen von Beginn an auf eine Literatur gesetzt, die irritiert und Ansprüche an den Leser stellt. Wie kam das beim Publikum an?

Meine ersten Erzählungen veröffentlichte ich Mitte der 1990er Jahre, als ich um die zwanzig war. Es waren dunkle, unheimliche Geschichten, und derlei erwartete man nicht von einer jungen Schriftstellerin. Damals schrieben arabische Autorinnen in der Regel persönliche, autobiografisch grundierte Bücher; imaginatives Schreiben war die Ausnahme. Interessanterweise haben auch manche westlichen Kritiker und Leser befremdet darauf reagiert. Ich erinnere mich an einen Zuhörer bei einer Lesung in Manchester, der meinte, ich solle mich doch lieber mit den Problemen der arabischen Frau befassen. Aber ich muss auch sagen, dass ich anderseits sehr viele positive, ermutigende Reaktionen auf meine Texte erhalten habe.

In diesen imaginativen Szenarien greifen Sie auch auf die eigene Kulturtradition zurück.

Ja, der islamischen Kultur und der ägyptischen Folklore schulde ich viel. Die metaphysische Seite der Religion interessiert mich, aber auch der Volksglaube: In dem Dorf im Nildelta, wo ich aufwuchs, waren Geister nicht etwas aus dem Kinderbuch, sondern Teil des täglichen Lebens. Die ältere Generation glaubte mit aller Selbstverständlichkeit, dass der Nil von Dschinnen und Feen bewohnt wird; auch das trug dazu bei, dass die reale und die imaginäre Welt für mich nicht wirklich getrennt sind. Auch den Märchen aus «Tausendundeiner Nacht» schulde ich sehr viel. Als ich klein war, hat meine Grossmutter Geschichten erzählt, von denen ich später viele in «Tausendundeiner Nacht» wiederfand. Das Interessante ist, dass meine Grossmutter keinerlei Bildung hatte, sie hatte von dieser Sammlung nie auch nur gehört; dennoch sind ihr die Erzählungen durch die Generationen hindurch vererbt worden. Im Zentrum meines neuen Romans, «Jabal al-Zumurrud» (Der Smaragdberg), steht übrigens ein verlorengegangenes Märchen aus «Tausendundeiner Nacht» – ein Märchen, das magische Kräfte hat.

Diesen dritten, bisher noch nicht übersetzten Roman haben Sie zwei Monate vor der Revolution begonnen und dann längere Zeit beiseitegelegt. War das Buch, das 2013 erschien, noch dasselbe, das Sie Ende 2010 konzipiert hatten?

Tatsächlich hat sich das Konzept des Romans radikal verändert. Ende 2011 war es offensichtlich, dass der Traum der Revolution sich in einen Albtraum zu verwandeln begann . Da griff ich wieder zu den Märchen aus «Tausendundeiner Nacht», sie wurden eine Art Zuflucht und Trost. Ich hatte damals das Gefühl, dass Schreiben nutz- und sinnlos ist; Worte können die Schrecken der Realität nicht verändern. Aber in «Tausendundeiner Nacht» geschieht es immer wieder – nicht nur in der Rahmenerzählung –, dass eine schöne Geschichte ein Schicksal verändert oder ein Leben rettet. So stellte ich mir, als ich die Arbeit am Roman wiederaufnahm, ein solches Märchen vor. Anderseits spürte ich beim Schreiben, wie sehr mich der ganze Horror ringsum beeinflusste; viele Figuren erleiden ein entsprechendes Schicksal.

Die ägyptische Kulturlandschaft hat sich in den letzten Jahren wohl ebenfalls stark gewandelt?

Bis 2011 arbeitete ich als Literaturredaktorin beim Kulturmagazin «Akhbar al-Adab», dann unterbrach ich diese Tätigkeit für drei Jahre. Als ich im August 2014 wieder zurückkehrte, war nichts mehr wie zuvor. Zahlreiche kleine Verlage waren entstanden, die nun die Szene dominierten, während grössere Verlage ihre Vormachtstellung verloren hatten. Autoren, die früher regelmässig auf den Bestsellerlisten standen, waren aus dem Rampenlicht verschwunden, andere waren an ihre Stelle getreten. Auffällig ist, dass eine seichte Horror- und Fantasy-Literatur bei den Lesern derzeit besonders gut ankommt. Die Leute wollen der Realität ringsum entfliehen, darum brauchen sie solche anspruchslosen Lektüren.Trotzdem glaube ich, dass sich die ägyptische Literatur momentan in einer Blütezeit befindet. Es gibt eine Menge guter Romane in unterschiedlichsten Genres, aber unglücklicherweise findet sich kein grosses Publikum für experimentelle Literatur. Das war auch früher so, aber es änderte sich in der letzten Dekade vor der Revolution; damals entstand eine Leserschaft für anspruchsvolle Werke. Jetzt ist es anders. Jeder kann alles publizieren, literarische Qualität ist nicht mehr vonnöten.

Die Repression unter Präsident al-Sisi ist schlimmer als zu Mubaraks Zeiten; ist das auch für Schriftsteller und Kulturschaffende spürbar?

Natürlich, aber nicht auf direkte Art. In Ägypten gibt es zum Beispiel keine Zensur vor der Publikation. Wenn Sie unsere neue Romanliteratur lesen würden, dann wären Sie beeindruckt – viele Autoren sind wagemutig, rebellisch, brechen Tabus. Deshalb versteht man nicht auf den ersten Blick, warum Zensur dennoch ein Thema ist. Sie kommt ins Spiel, wenn irgendein senkrechter Bürger ein Buch liest und vor Gericht geht, weil er das Gefühl hat, es verstosse gegen die öffentliche Moral oder beleidige die Nation. Die Literaturschaffenden fühlen sich dadurch aber eigentlich nicht behindert – wie ich schon sagte, gibt es viele, die sich sehr weit vorwagen, und auch mutige Verlage, die diese Bücher auf den Markt bringen. Und ohne die Zensurfälle kleinreden zu wollen, muss ich doch sagen, dass sie eher die Ausnahme von der Regel sind.

Die Medien dagegen stehen unter massivem Druck seitens der Regierung. Bilden die Social Media nach wie vor – wie zur Zeit der Revolte – eine Gegenöffentlichkeit, in der Informationen und Meinungen freier kursieren können?

Ja, verglichen mit Presse und Fernsehen sind die Social Media wesentlich freier. Aber man wird für das, was man schreibt, auch häufig angegriffen, zum Beispiel von Anhängern Sisis oder der Muslimbrüder. Leider sind die Social Media nicht mehr, wie in der Zeit der Revolution, ein Medium für Dialog und Kommunikation; sie dienen hauptsächlich dem Austausch von Beleidigungen. Alle sind wütend und hacken aufeinander herum. Aber man kann sogar darin noch etwas Positives sehen. Vor der Revolution hatte ich das Gefühl, dass alle genau wie die andern sein wollten, man war Ägypter, man war Teil der Nation. Die Revolution liess die Menschen gewahr werden, dass das eine Illusion ist; sie zwang die Leute, die anderen zu sehen, wie sie sind, und all die Brüche in der Gesellschaft zu erkennen . Für mich ist das eine aufklärerische Erfahrung; es ist das Wertvollste, was wir von der Revolution bewahren konnten.

Als Mohammed Mursi gestürzt wurde, hatten Sie die Hoffnung, dass der Geist der Revolution Ägypten auch weiterhin vor neuen Diktatoren schützen würde. Es scheint schwer, noch daran zu glauben.

Ohne Hoffnung können wir nicht leben, nicht wahr? Natürlich versuche ich gleichzeitig, nicht naiv zu sein. Es wird keine Revolution geben, wenn das Volk sie nicht mitträgt. Aber im Moment haben die Menschen das Gefühl, dass eine Revolution nicht der richtige Weg zur Veränderung ist. Viele Ägypter möchten vor allem Sicherheit; sie wollen nicht dasselbe Schicksal erleiden wie der Irak oder Syrien. Das kann ich verstehen. Was ich weniger gut begreife, ist, dass sie deshalb sogar bereit sind, einen neuen Diktator zu unterstützen . Auch die Staatsmedien spielen dabei eine Rolle. Sie verzerren einerseits das Bild der Revolution, stellen sie als eine Verschwörung fremder Mächte dar. Gleichzeitig gelingt es dem Regime paradoxerweise, den Leuten weiszumachen, es sei der wahre Beschützer der Werte, welche die ägyptische Revolution portiert hatte.

Wie gehen Aktivisten, die sich – wie Sie – an vorderster Front für die Revolution engagierten, mit dieser Situation um?

Viele Aktivisten glauben noch immer an ihre Ziele. Aber sie wissen nicht mehr, was sie tun sollen. Am Anfang war es unser Stolz, dass es in der Bewegung keine Führer gab. Aber faktisch würden wir jemanden brauchen, der unsere Bewegung organisiert und ihr eine Richtung gibt. Übrigens wird auch in der Bevölkerung Unzufriedenheit mit dem Sisi-Regime spürbar, aber die Menschen fragen sich: Was ist die Alternative? Was könnten wir überhaupt tun? Und das sind leider sehr vernünftige Fragen.

Haben Sie sich angesichts dieser Situation auch schon überlegt, das Land zu verlassen?

Ich hoffe, dass ich nicht fortgehen muss. Für mich ist diese Zeit ein essenzieller Lernprozess. Aber wenn ich es einfach nicht mehr aushalte oder wenn die Sicherheit meiner Kinder gefährdet ist – dann werde ich vielleicht gezwungen sein, über das Fortgehen nachzudenken.

Via: Neue Zürcher Zeitung 

On Beyond Paradise

Ahmed Khalifa

Book Review: Beyond Paradise وراء الفردوس by Mansoura Ez Eldin:

After establishing herself as one of Egypt's finest writers with her previous novel, Maryam's Maze, Mansoura Ez Eldin decides to do something daring with her second novel. Shift gears and try something different and more difficult to pull off. Well, does she succeed? The novel, titled Beyond Paradise, at first seems to be her attempt at a grand Gothic novel a la some of the works of Joyce Carol Oates; a novel high on melodrama and with a large cast of eccentric characters. But to expect conventionalism from Ez Eldin wouldn't be smart, and after the stunningly gripping (and Gothic) opening, the novel shifts gears and becomes a sprawling psychological study of several characters as told through the eyes of an unreliable narrator: a young woman seemingly grieving for her just deceased father. 

Ez Eldin takes us on a compelling journey through the lives and psyches of the characters, and every now and then shows us their worst fears and nightmares with her assured style and penchant for nightmarish imagery. It's an intriguing piece of work, occasionally fascinating, and, above all, daring and stylish. And to me, the last sentence of the novel is sheer brilliance and manages to end the novel on an effectively chilling note.

Via: arabic-lit.blogspot

Maryam and the Minotaur

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."

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

من يعرف سر الفردوس

يوسف رخا

“ترجل أربعة رجال من العربة مرتدين عباءات سوداء فوق جلابيبهم الكشمير، وفتحوا الباب الخلفي. أخرجوا منه جسداً مغطى بملاءة بيضاء، وحملوه صاعدين السلالم.”

بتماسك يستحضر المشاهد الأقوى من ثلاثية “الأب الروحي” لفرانسيس فورد كوبولا، استثمرت منصورة عز الدين – منذ “متاهة مريم” (2004) – تراثها العائلي في إعادة اختراع العالم: فجرت علاقة بنت الريف بالمدينة بعيداً عن أي فرضيات مستهلكة حول “الأقاليم” أو “المرأة”. وبإلغاز لا يستتبع ضعفاً في التركيز، عرّت كل شيء – الجنون، الموت، الأنوثة – دون أن تكشف سراً واحداً من أسرار نصوص أشبه “باللاڤا لامپ”، ذلك الفانوس البيضاوي الذي يسخر الكهرباء، لا للإنارة، بل للتلاعب بالضوء الملون.

هذه هي “كتابة السر”، كما سماها الناقد محمد بدوي إثر قراءة قصص كتابها الأول، “ضوء مهتز”.

واليوم، على خلفية الأقدار المتقلبة لصناعة الطوب وما استتبعته من تجريف الأرض الزراعية في دلتا الثمانينيات، يتسع مجال التداعي من منامات قاهرية مستجدة إلى ذاكرة كاتبة محبطة لطفولتها في العزبة والبندر، من جرائم القتل الحلمية إلى الفجيعة الواقعة وفقدان البراءة وعفاريت الأحباب الغائبين: في “وراء الفردوس” تتبلور قدرة منصورة عز الدين على بناء شخصيات حية ورسم الخطوط العريضة لمجتمع متمايز، مقترحة معاني غير تنويرية للوعي التاريخي وأسطورة القرين.

وبرغم المبالغة في الانضباط الأسلوبي (على حساب خصوصية صوت الراوية، أحياناً)، برغم التعدد المربك (أحياناً أيضاً) للشخصيات والحواديت، وبرغم أن تجاوُر مختلف المآرب الأدبية لا يبلغ دائماً غاية الامتزاج العضوي، تنتج منصورة عز الدين كتابة محبوكة، عميقة، سائغة، خالية ليس فقط من شوائب الذات (النسوية) وإنما كذلك من تهويمات المحيط (الريفي). بلا تعقيد مجهد أو ادعاءات “علمية”، تتجاوز “وراء الفردوس” القرية “الإدريسية” وإنسان “الأيام السبعة”، “حكاية” حنان الشيخ ومثلية صبا الحرز.

تتجاوز حتى الهوية الوطنية والجنسية، وتهمش بطلتيها حاملتي تلك الهوية، لتجوب فضاءات – مثل كاتبتها – تكشف دون أن تبوح.

نُشِرت المقالة في جريدة الأخبار.

Nabil Shawkat on Beyond Paradise

By: Nabil Shawkat

The National, March 2, 2010

Mansoura Ez Eldin knows her way around the land of dreams. In her short novel Beyond Paradise (Wara al-Firdaws), she packs enough imagery for a three-volume work. Her power of imagination is such that sometimes, while reading her novel, I wished that she would drop some of the subplots and forget about some of the side characters. But even as the thought went through my mind, I enjoyed every sketch and every little dream. In a detailed, compact and colourful style, she tells the story of two friends, Salma and Gamila, living in the Egyptian countryside in the 1980s. Gamila, the poorer one, rises from poverty to become a respectable academic, while Salma, the more affluent one, finds herself in an unsuccessful marriage and decides to seek salvation through writing. This is perhaps a reference to Ez Eldin's own life, for she used to sit near the bed of her dying mother and pretend to write simply because her mother took pride in her daughter's career. Born in 1976 in a small village on the Nile in the Delta, Ez Eldin got a job with the prestigious Akhbar al-Adab (Literature News) upon her graduation from the Mass Communication College at Cairo University in 1998. Her first book was a collection of stories called Daw' Mohtazz (Flickering Light) that came out in 2001. Her first novel, Matahat Maryam (Maryam's Maze), won her wide recognition and has been translated into English. "Even when I am too busy at the paper, I write down notes, ideas, and sketches for whenever the time allows, and I work on those later," she said in response to written questions. "I write in my room on a laptop. I cannot work in coffeehouses. "I wrote a major part of my first novel, Maryam's Maze, holding my baby in my left hand while I typed with my right. Sometimes I put her in her crib to play while I wrote, and when she cried I stopped. "I use mythology and dreams for purely aesthetic reasons. Our literary tradition is rich with artistry. Take, for example, The Interpretation of Dreams (Tafsir al-Ahlam) by Ibn Sirin, a work that I greatly admire. It is full of poetic interpretations of dreams. Also, our oral history is stunningly beautiful."

Beyond Paradise

Mansoura Ez Eldin, Beyond Paradise
 Chapter 4translated by Sophia Vasalou 

Salma sits on the balcony of her father's house reading Love in the Time of Cholera. Every time she starts on a new page, she goes back to the last one to make sure she's really read it. Her clouded mind mixes up people, mixes up events.
      Her aunt Nazla greets the various guests who have been arriving since morning for the first commemoration of Rashid's passing. Every time a new one arrives, she casts a sharp glance in Salma's direction, as if to stir her from her seat to welcome the guest alongside her, but her niece stares back at her without registering any reaction.
      Her mind wanders aimlessly through the novel lying open in her hands without fully taking in what she's reading. Nazla worries people might think Salma has lost it; for how could she be sitting there with hair dishevelled, all colourfully dressed, reading away without the least bit of evidence of being properly in mourning? Nazla calmly leads the guests to the interior where they can sit in the living room far away from the strange-mannered woman that Salma has become.
      A little brown bird flies down to the black railing that runs atop the balcony wall. Salma follows it with her eyes with full attention as it hops about. She counts its steps but she can't keep up the counting, she keeps thinking she's missed a beat and she has to start from scratch. Then her arm flails in the air, the little bird takes fright, and flies away.
      Suddenly she becomes aware of the sound of a black Mercedes coming to a halt in front of the house raising a cloud of dust. Out steps Margot Michelle in a black dress that reveals a handsome and well-groomed pair of legs. Her face is a riot of make-up that is entirely out of keeping with the time of day and the occasion of her visit, which is the first anniversary of Rashid's death.
      She comes up the stairs with calm and confident steps, followed by her father, who looks many years older than his real age owing to the rough state of his knees, which have greatly affected his mobility. Salma watches them as they make their way toward her. Her eyes latch on to the sparkling necklace on Margot's neck. She tries to tear her eyes away from it but she cannot do so. Margot approaches, and greets her coolly with a shake of her hand. Salma doesn't look at her face because her gaze is still nailed to the necklace. It's not a gaze of admiration or interest, just a vacant gaze with no particular feelings attached to it, like the look of someone in the grip of some kind of possession.
      “Where's tante Soraya?”
      She's said this in an expressionless voice, and without waiting around for an answer which  she would not be hearing from Salma, she's stepped inside trailed by her father with his crooked, aged gait.
      Salma cracks her fingers, resuming her post. She throws the novel dully onto the table before her, as she struggles to drive out the memory of an ancient laugh that resembles the sound of gurgling water:      Little Margot bursts into peals of laughter, her laugh clots and clusters itself over and over as if she was gargling hot water, before the voice rises in pitch with a shrill ring and the sharp-edged laughter comes to a halt.
      Her eyes are black, their colour is the colour of wine, she has coal-black hair. She wears a red dress with a large black print of Mickey Mouse flourishing a maestro's baton across the chest. The dress finishes at her knees with a hem covered by tiny Mickey Mouses that ring the girl's legs round and round.      Margot laughs as she walks along the Nile with Hiyam, Gameela, Salma, Khaled and Hisham, trying to evade the needle grass and the foxtail which scrape her legs on the way to the cornfield. Everyone goes out of their way to give her special treatment, and her boldness is astounding. Though she's so young, she calls uncle Mustafa, whom all the other kids regard with a sense of terror, just by his first name. And that's the same uncle a mere angry look from whom to any of the children is enough to make their heart quake within their chest.
      Margot laughs and keeps repeating French words nobody else understands. She looks at the Nile, its purple hyacinth and the boughs of the willow trees leaning over the water, and she says it's just like Venice.
      She has never laid eyes on Venice and despite that she always insists she knows everything. She's better than the rest. She's cleverer than anyone else. She's the one that studies at the Sacre-Coeur.
      She spends the whole time assiduously promoting herself, advertising her superiority over everyone around her, most of whom have never set foot outside this faraway place.
      Hiyam follows her around like a shadow, she trails her like a dog anywhere she goes in the village, with Soraya's encouragement; for the girl needs to be treated with special attention, out of respect for the uncle who's a friend of her father's, and out of respect for the glow that surrounds her because she dresses different, and speaks different, and everything about her is different from anything they're used to.
      Salma didn't warm to her much at first, and she couldn't understand why her maternal grandmother handled her like a fragile, precious piece of china, whereas she'd treat the girls that belonged to the family like they were creatures of a lesser God, like “calamities,” as she'd refer to them.
      Young Salma would look at the cross etched roughly into the right hand of the ever-laughing Margot and would say nothing. She would hang back watching her every movement and observe with astonishment the welcome her grandmother Rahma would give her when she came to their house to say hello to tante Soraya, as she called her.
      She'd be astonished because “the pious mother,” as people called her, was the very same woman who'd slapped her cheeks and shrieked into Jaber's face when he hired Rizq to work the furnace at the brick factory, replacing the first furnace worker who'd quit after seeing Saber's ghost standing over the factory's towering chimney.      “Is the world so small that you couldn't find anyone else but that Christian to work for you?” She screamed at him. And she didn't listen when he tried to explain:
      “That's the best furnace worker in the whole of Wagh Qibli, ma'am – every single brick factory in the region has been fighting to get him.”      She issued her verdict without so much as a glance at him:
      “God will never give your factory His blessing so long as that Christian is in it!”      This woman, who'd say to Rizq and his wife Aeda, “Wonderful to see you, my darlings,” while stealing virulent looks at the green cross etched into both their hands, was the same person who'd greet Margot Michelle with kisses and hugs and shut her eyes against her cross. It's only Margot that's the daughter of the wealthy engineer who's a friend of Soraya's family and a prospective business partner for her son Jaber in his future dealings.
      For her part, Margot refuses to play with Rizq and Aeda's kids, Marise and Girgis, during her summer visits to the village. She sidelines them completely and gets all in a huff when they approach her, and she only moves around surrounded by her personal entourage, which consists of Hiyam, Khaled, and the rest of the kids in the family, including Salma and Gameela, who never utters a word.
      Margot's presence disconcerts Marise, she feels the distance widen between her and the other children accompanying the girl that laughs like gurgling water. She watches them wide-eyed as they pass by the old potato storehouse which Jaber gave her family to live in, she wishes she could join their endless expeditions and games, but if Salma approaches her asking her to join them, she hardly makes a reply and she frowns in refusal, concentrating her attention on whatever she's doing, whether she's sweeping the front of the storehouse or picking castor oil plant flowers and leaves to play with.      Like Mustafa's wife, Nahad, Margot keeps complaining about the mosquitoes which bring out her delicate skin in a rash. She constantly compares the village, with its total lack of comforts and conveniences, to Cairo, the big city. Her reproofs against the village consist in:
      (1) The rampant spread of mosquitoes during summer.      (2) The lack of supermarkets, sports clubs, or places for entertainment – and this is what annoys her the most.      (3) The fact that people don't call things by their proper names. They say “the sea” when they mean the Nile or the river, and they say “Egypt” when they really mean “Cairo.”      She would often repeat the last observation in front of Salma, so that Rashid's daughter came to formulate her personal definition of civilised society as consisting in “the fact that people call things by their proper names,” and she still adhered to this definition faithfully years later even after she'd gained a broader experience of the world.
      She'd get annoyed at her mother if she asked her, “Will you be going to the sea today?” and she would snap back, “It's called the Nile.” Soraya would carry on impatiently: “The point is, will you be going or won't you?”
      She'd feel ashamed of her mother for being so uncivilised, and she'd resolve herself that when she grew up she'd be different. Salma might not know it or want to admit it, but Margot had a strong influence on her.
      Despite Margot's reproofs against the village, she eagerly keeps coming back every summer to spend a considerable part of her holidays there, because she relishes the many enjoyments it affords her, like the excursions on the Nile and in the boat of Awf's sons with Hisham and Khaled, and the green corn they would roast in the field in a religious ritual that enraptured the girl with the perpetual laughter, a rapture like the one she felt at the special treatment enveloping her from every side.
      Margot arrives every summer with her father and his business partner Mustafa, staying at the Assistant's house, as they call it, with Salma's maternal grandmother and her unmarried aunt Anwar. Two days later at most, her father departs together with Mustafa, leaving his daughter with the family for an entire month.
      In the house known as the Assistant's house, surrounded by her mother's family, Salma experiences a sense of inferiority that instantly disappears the moment she finds herself within her father's family. Among her paternal uncles, she's her father's pampered daughter or Rashid's little princess, the daughter that gets him into quarrels with Jaber, who says that's not the way to bring up a girl – “if you happen to break one of her ribs, she'll grow another twenty-four in their place”, as the saying has it.      In the house of her maternal grandparents, she becomes plain old “Soraya's girl” – that daughter, Soraya, who, should she and her sister Anwar demand their right in their father's inheritance, would tear the family apart and turn the plot of land they own into tatters.
      Even Soraya's mother looks upon her daughter's children as interlopers in her family. Soraya is aware of this, even though she has never openly admitted it. She is torn between the love she has for her family, and her husband's hatred of that family. She has learnt not to let her anger show. It was only a handful of occasions, of which Salma retains only the mistiest remembrance, that alerted her to the sense of disappointment her mother secretly harboured.
 *** Salma was still rapt in her thoughts when Margot and her father walked out of the house nearly an hour later.
      This time Margot cast her a look containing traces of pity as she walked past. She went slowly down the stairs holding her father's arm to help him make his way down. She took her seat before the wheel, waited until her father had gotten in beside her, and then drove off.
      This speedy take-off, which brought Salma back to her senses, struck her as the dividing line between two different worlds and lives. A first life in which the world was just as she had known it as a child, a safe place in which everyone treated her with special attention and fretted over her, a world which contained her father, Gameela and Hiyam with her old personality. And a new life in which she had lost everything she had once desired.
      Margot and her father Michelle had been the last guests to leave, and now that they'd gone, Salma would again have to face her mother and aunt. Over the last days, they had been too busy preparing for the commemoration and then receiving the guests to pay her any attention. Now they would resume their favourite place on the veranda and Nazla, egged on by Soraya, would start asking Salma again about what had happened between her and her husband Ziya, and why she hadn't followed him to Manchester as she'd told everyone she would when he suddenly took off a few months ago no sooner had she been released from the clinic where she'd been admitted immediately after her father's death to be treated for nervous breakdown.      Salma rose quickly from her seat and headed for Khaled's old room. She sat down at the desk and bent over her papers to start writing:
       I often feel that I'm unnatural...that I've gone mad, in some sense or other, but with the kind of madness that's hard to pin down or notice as an outside observer.
      I'm the only one aware of this tame madness that grows slowly and relentlessly within me. It's like a secret cancer that eats me up from inside. Or rather, it's not my madness that's the cancer feeding off me, it is I myself that is the cancer boring deep inside. I have become a virulent cancerous cell in a feeble body that is my own.
      My outward strength and that sense of self-confidence are nothing but a rigid mask that conceals the monstrous madness that threatens me. There are mornings that make me feel as though I was standing outside the world, or in the simplest case, that I was living on its outer boundary – mornings that tell me, without ever uttering a single word, that I lack identity, lack memory, lack the power to do the simplest things.
      There are times when I stand in front of the bathroom mirror, moments after getting out of bed, and I can no longer remember my name. I'm not talking about total forgetting, but about that sense of having been torn away by the roots which, for a few moments, makes me incapable of remembering distinctly everything that concerns me, so that I see my face and it means nothing to me. I struggle to define my place in this world, in this body that is occupied by my spirit.
      I regularly have this experience. And then I become incapable of doing something as simple as turning on the tap. I stare at my toothbrush in amazement, trying to remember how to use it. That sense of being torn away from myself lasts for a few seconds before I recover my sense of normality. But it's enough to leave me terrified, for it makes me realise that I'm unsafe, that I could cease to exist at any moment.
      Mornings like that leave my responses sluggish for the rest of the day. I feel astonished when I hear my mother or my aunt Nazla uttering my name with confident matter-of-factness, or when Hiyam picks up the thread of a conversation we'd started the day before. But I've never told anyone, not even my therapist, about the sense of complete dissociation I sometimes experience from the world around me.
      I walk through tightly pressed streets and my eyes see nothing. I don't see the country around me that has suddenly grown old, because the only thing that occupies my thoughts is the madness growing within me and I'm all alone with it.
      I feel as if I'm living a single day that endlessly keeps repeating itself. I'm in a constant state of déjà vu. Everything I go through, I feel as if I've already experienced before. Everything happening around me seems like an eternal replication of a single event I once experienced in childhood.
      Nothing changes in my life. Nothing changes in the country I live in. It's as if we were faced with a single day in which one and only set of changeless events unfolds.
      I shut my eyes and see other worlds before me. I see a world of glowing brilliance in which trees are red, plants are red, the seas and skies are varying shades of green, and blue is just a shadow the other two colours cast.
      I call it a coloured paradise. I flee to it, leaving myself and my disappointments behind. I become someone else, with little to connect her to my real self.
    
***   
On “beautiful” mornings, Salma would be in her best form. She would leave her small flat early to head for the newspaper where she worked, hardly noticing the traffic jams, the ramshackle buses, the cars belonging to the Central Security Forces lining the streets to pre-empt possible demonstrations. She would remind herself that nothing could take the place of good mornings; they had the power to transform an entire life from misery to bliss.
      She didn't have a specific definition of what a beautiful morning consisted in, but she could feel it from the moment she opened her eyes to find herself more alert than normal, her mind clearer, the nagging thoughts that normally preoccupied her having retreated temporarily to the back of her mind.
      On those mornings, Salma would look at the world around her with new eyes. Its colours would seem to be lit up with the intensified brilliance of technicolour, as in those old films that made the world appear brighter than it was in reality. She would find it hard to tell, was it things themselves that were actually different on those beautiful mornings? Or was it her own mind that suffused them with this luminous air?
      Salma hates the metro, even though it's the best way of getting around in this crowded city. When circumstances forced her to take it, she would come out feeling suffocated, and she'd only feel herself coming back to life once she was back on the ground. During those times, the world would turn into a spectacle of black and white, or one wearing only the faintest colours at best. So on beautiful mornings, she would avoid the metro, and instead would take the microbus or the minibus which dropped her off at the stop nearest to the newspaper where she worked, because she wanted to feel herself surrounded by people. That's why she'd take her small car only rarely, and she'd only resort to a cab if she had no other choice. In a cab she'd have to listen to the endless chatter of the driver.
      The distance between the bus stop and her work was just five minutes to walk, but on beautiful mornings she would take a quarter of an hour over it, because she'd want to linger and let her eyes take in the world around her in the marvelling amazement of an Alice in wonderland.
      The spectacle of the beggar slumped on the pavement would transform itself into a work of art worthy of contemplation, and the grimy young girl selling packets of tissue paper at the traffic lights would turn into a being calculated to evoke not sorrow, but joy. Her sense of smell would not register the exhaust fumes, and her eyes would not notice the film of dust overlaying everything in the city around her. Her failed relationship with Ziya, too, would be as good as forgotten.
      When she reached the entrance of the newspaper building, the glass door would slide open in front of her the moment she stepped toward it, and even though she was used to seeing this every day, the spontaneous opening of the door would take her by surprise every single time. She would greet the receptionist with a joyful “Good morning,” and the man would reply with trenchantly intoned words: “And may God's peace, mercy and blessings rest upon you, too.”      She was used to ignoring the animosity in the receptionist's tone and the disapproving look he would cast on her short hemlines. She would quickly make her way to the lift, enter her office with a calm step, pour herself her morning cup of coffee, and assiduously begin to go through the poems and short stories she had to prepare for publication.      She was not a journalist in the ordinary sense of the term. She had never written a single article or news report in her life, for her job was to oversee a weekly literary feature in a daily paper to which the paper's general editors assigned such scant importance that it was frequently confined to just half a page, in deference to the power of ads.
      She was supposed to read through the texts and select those that were fit for publication after revising their language. These being short stories and poems, she was not entitled to interfere with them by way of adding or deleting without consulting their authors, but her favourite pastime was introducing special touches of her own into these texts, particularly the stories. It was harder to fool around with the poems without their authors noticing. Stories, on the other hand, almost seemed to collude with her against their authors, all the more given how adept long practice had made her.
      She'd get highly annoyed with particular linguistic constructions and would prefer to see them replaced with others. She'd fly into a rage on spotting errors of grammar or syntax and she would correct them at once, and sometimes she'd take this as far as replacing a word the author had used with another one of her own choosing.      With luck on her side, she'd manage to plant a word of her own into more than one place in the story, and then she would spend the rest of the day brimming with happiness as she tried to think up ways of putting those words together to form meaningful sentences that had nothing to do with their original context in the story. And if luck didn't abet her, she would select two or three words at random and substitute them with other words of the same meaning.
      She would experience a mysterious kind of relish as she left her mark on those texts, and even though none of the writers found her out, or at least none of them registered any complaint, she somehow wished one of them might call her up to remonstrate against her. She wished for this against all justice and reason, yet it never took place, perhaps because most writers didn't go back to a story they'd written and knew inside out once it was published to look for their precise words, or perhaps because her changes left their style more gracious and more composed.
      She had no trouble meddling with other people's writing, but when she suddenly set out to write a novel all her own, she found herself in genuine straits. She'd feel her words losing their meaning, and turning into lifeless bodies stacked next to one another. At other times, what she wrote would strike her as banal and sentimental, a travesty of pure kitsch.
      Salma wanted life and art to be one and the same. And that was her biggest problem. She would look at people around her as if they were literary characters, and would observe their behavior from a position of detachment. She'd be vexed by the additional nitty-gritty details that went beyond her vision of what was beautiful and aesthetically pleasing.
      When she began to write about her family, she ground to a flustered halt. She found herself incapable of laying hold of what was essential in their characters, and her sense of standing at a loss was greatest faced with her father's recalcitrant personality. Art seemed incapable of getting the threads of that recalcitrance into grip; the moment it was on paper, all of its cogency would drain away. Life might tolerate exaggeration and excess, but art wouldn't.      Little by little, Salma forgot that the purpose of writing had originally been been a therapeutic one, building on a recommendation of her therapist's, and embarked on an effort which had all the appearance of seriousness, to write a novel about her family.
      Her therapist knew all about Salma's way of working, and indeed she had the distinction of being the only person to whom she'd related how she dealt with other people's texts, so she asked her to record her thoughts about her life and the life of her family. Next thing you knew, Rashid's daughter had turned this into the idea of writing a novel.
      Salma hadn't read Borges' Universal History of Infamy, so she knew nothing about the kind of person who, incapable of writing stories of his own, found his only sport in spoiling and perverting the stories of other people. But acting on her own native impulse, she decided to change the nature of her pastime and to go from leaving her mark on the stories she published, to distorting and meddling with the life and deeds of real living people, particularly once the onset of her illness had forced her to resign her job.
      What her therapist had chiefly hoped for was to get her to write about herself and her life and bring out into the open all the things that remained uncertain, especially as her patient excelled in the arts of deception and in mixing up her accounts of events, making all their sessions seem like a waste of time and all the medications and pills an exercise in futility.
      When Salma announced to her that she intended to turn those scattered bits of writing into a novel, her therapist was by no means convinced that her patient was capable, in her present state, of writing a work with the complexity of a novel. And she sorely regretted having first encouraged her to take up writing when Salma's novel-writing venture turned into a new obsession that transformed her monthly visits into outbursts of frustration over the problems she was facing in her writing.        Her therapist would now have to struggle hard to drag Salma back to the main issue and the heart of her problem, which was Ziya and the fact that he'd left her, and Gameela and her complicated relationship with her. But she'd be astounded every time to find that her patient had made additions or subtractions in the particulars which were capable of transforming both characters into entirely different persons.
      It did not take long for her to realise that her patient was talking to her, not about the flesh-and-blood real-life individuals, but about the literary characters of Gameela and Ziya as they figured in her would-be novel.
      Her therapist also noticed that most of what she recorded went back to the days of her childhood, and that a large part of it revolved around two persons, her father and her childhood friend Gameela. There was a deep interconnection between her view of Gameela and her view of herself. She would sometimes talk about Gameela as if they were one and the same person. Over the course of a single paragraph, she would mix up references to Gameela with references to herself more than once. At other times, her friend would appear as a traitor or a victim in a glaring contradiction which her therapist was never able to resolve.