Literature versus reality: Chasing fata morganas

Mansoura Ez-Eldin

She fought for renewal and lost her illusions. In a very personal text, Egyptian writer Mansoura Ez-Eldin explains how literature accompanied her through a time of radical change 

Barely four weeks after the massacre of 14 August 2013, I was driving through Cairo with my little daughter beside me. The mood in the city was heated. Mohammed Morsi had been chased out of office three months before and then more than 800 people had died when the security forces raided a Muslim Brotherhood protest camp.

Suddenly, the traffic came to a standstill. In Cairo′s ever-crowded streets, the crush was so dense it seemed as though the cars were piling on top of one another. From nearby Bayn-al-Sarayat, we heard the sound of guns firing. Perhaps Kalashnikovs.

By that time I had learned to distinguish the various types of firearms. Normally, though, the sound of shots only reached me from a distance; I was usually at home, trying to distract my two children from what was going on outside. That day, though, I was close to the action; I found out from passers-by that Islamists and security forces had clashed. My only thought was to get my daughter out of the danger zone.

After minutes that felt like an eternity, silence fell – but for a single hysterical voice calling down death and destruction upon us all for having silently colluded with the regime and allowed the massacre of the Muslim Brothers. What did it matter that there were surely people among us who had condemned the massacre and others who had themselves been victims of the Islamists or the regime? As soon as shots are fired, every dialogue falls silent. Finally the traffic thinned out and I hurried home to write down what I′d experienced.

Books don′t save lives 

Before 2011, I was by no means a regular diarist. But when the insurgencies began I grew almost addicted to putting incidents and images into words. The short fragments began to add up. It was an activity with no purpose or use – or was I seeking refuge in writing because it was the best way I had of understanding what was happening?

I remember coming home from the demonstration on 28 January 2011, the famous ″Friday of Anger″ and going straight to my desk to write down what I′d experienced. Tears ran down my face, so powerless and helpless had I felt up against the brutal armed violence of the security forces.

I did the same after every demonstration, at least in 2011, when the Arab Spring was blossoming and it seemed as though our frozen world was starting to thaw. Just taking part in the demonstrations and writing about it gave me the feeling I could make myself useful.

At the beginning of 2012, it became clear that the established regimes were prepared to do anything to prevent fundamental change in the Arab world. The blood spilled by the men in power tainted the entire horizon. Particularly Syria, Libya and Yemen paid a horrific price: thousands of innocent people died, cities were reduced to rubble, the number of war refugees multiplied from day to day.

At the time, my mobility was restricted for health reasons. I was depressed, felt weak and defenceless – and the most dangerous thing: I was close to losing my faith in the importance of literature, because books can′t save human lives.

Strangely, though, that didn′t make me give up reading and writing. Instead, I plunged into it like a woman possessed. I revisited the notes for my novel Jabal al-Zumurrud, which I had almost forgotten by 2011 and also returned to the tales of 1001 Nights.

The obvious reason was the novel I was working on, which is interwoven with the collection of tales; yet without knowing, I was searching deep within for something to restore my faith in literature and lend my existence new meaning.

Most of the stories from 1001 Nights are a hymn in praise of narrative imagination, capable through their sheer refinement of saving lives, changing fates and breaking evil spells. In Jabal al-Zumurrud, too, regaining a lost story brings the world back into balance and the magic of letters awakens the dead from their ashes.

Disfigured stories 

Yet I didn′t want my novel to be a naive hymn to writing, created only to lull my own fears. I wanted to explore the relationship between written and oral stories, starting with the ideas of Derrida and Plato, reflected in the pharaonic myth of the invention of script by the deity Thot. I thought about the mechanics of disfiguring meaning, about the relationship between the original and its adulterated copies – as though I were reading the distorted story of the Egyptian revolution while tracking down the distorted story of Princess Zumurruda in my novel.

″Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life,″ Pessoa wrote. But the best thing about literature – about good literature – is that it helps us to understand the world while we think we′re ignoring it. At least on a metaphorical level, it helps us to escape in times of violence. Over the past six years, I have realised that I seek refuge in books when reality lets me down and leaves me in the lurch. Is it explanations I look for in them? Comfort and consolation? I don′t think so.

If I read and wrote to excess during this time, then not because I believed in the power of words and the importance of literature. Quite the opposite. What drove me were profound doubts in both.

Literature doesn′t work like a drug

Charles Bukowski wrote: ″Find what you love and let it kill you.″ It seems to me that I was trying – absolutely unconsciously – to drown in what I loved, to numb my disappointment at failures in real life through reading and writing. But literature doesn′t work like a drug. We realise abruptly that it has sharpened our senses, multiplied our sensibility; that it unfolds reality and reveals its structures so that we can discover what is hidden and silenced within it.

As well as the tales of 1001 Nights, what helped me in that time was above all revisiting the work of Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi and W. G. Sebald. Sebald′s books especially touched something deep in my soul, for his rescued individuals are never really saved; memory ruins them. The Holocaust is entrenched forever in Sebald′s work and the war lives on for decades after its end in memory – as though the writer′s eyes saw the hidden ruins behind the facades of every city.

That literary world fitted well with the reality in which I was living. Over the past years, I had the feeling of drowning in hundreds and thousands of dark images and scenes, suffocated by decay and the dust of destruction, plagued by cities that had become graves for their inhabitants.

Sometimes I ask myself: can words ever rebuild ruins? Everything I′ve written since 2011 reflects that question.

The lament over the ravaged home was an essential motif in pre-Islamic poetry. Yet I don′t want to write elegies, nor weep over metropolises sunk into dust and ashes; instead I demand, with childlike defiance, that the power of imagination re-erect what has been destroyed.

A vain demand, of course. For me, though, writing is an attempt to make sculptures out of ice on the equator; or to chase a fata morgana, to play with it, even to create it oneself – to dissolve reality into an illusion and pretend that mirage is the appearance of a reality, just waiting for us to quench our thirst with its fleeting waters. That′s how I put it in my most recent novel.

The calm after the terror 

And still I am trying to save myself by quenching my thirst from the fleeting waters of the fata morgana called writing. But is it really a rescue? In terms of my body, I narrowly escaped death on that ″Friday of Anger″ in 2011, then again in the fighting on Muhammad Mahmud Street that November. Or on the day when a bomb went off shortly after I′d passed its location – the thought of it still sends shivers down my back.

Have I saved my psyche? I′m not so sure. Perhaps, like Sebald′s characters, I will have to live with my destructive memories, no matter how much I try to fool the ghosts through my writing. Or even through the mere intention of writing. I console myself by saying:

One day I′ll write about the calm that descends after the bomb has gone off. About how the people vanish from the streets and the city holds its breath while the cars almost fly to get away from the site of the attack.

″After the attack, this place will be safe for a few days at least,″ I tell myself against better judgement – the atrocities in our city have never been calculable. Aimless, I roam the empty streets and try to see the positive . . . the calm that descends after the bomb has gone off.

Mansoura Ez-Eldin 

© Neuer Zuricher Zeitung 2017

Translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire

Mansoura Ez-Eldin, born in the Nile delta in 1976, is a writer and journalist. Her novel ″Beyond Paradise″ has been translated into German and ″Maryam′s Maze″ was published in English in 2007. Her most recent book, ″Jabal al-Zumurrud″, has appeared in French under the title ″Le Mont Emeraude″.

© Qantara.de 2017

Mansoura Ez Eldin's novel "Shadow Specters": The fantasy of wholeness

Marija M. Bulatovic shares her impressions of "Shadow Specters" by Mansoura Ez Eldin – recently translated into Serbian by Dragana Djordjevic as "Priviđenja iz senke"

Mansoura Ez Eldin’s novel "Shadow Specters" reminded me of a very common experience that each of us will be familiar with: the moment of waking up in a dark room. At first, except for darkness, we discern almost nothing, until suddenly, out of shape, outlines of certain forms begin to appear.

These forms emerge from the dark, obscure, disfigured, and often in such a state of perceptual consciousness that we take them to be something quite different, owing to the minimal amount of the light they absorb. Such chimeras, born out of the play of light and dark, lightness and shadow, are found in the evaporation zone of form and matter in Mansoura Ez Eldin’s novel.

The novel is "a very complicated story" (phrase taken from the title of one of the chapters), which begins and ends with the conversation of two characters, two artists, on a bench in front of the Kafka Museum in Prague. That conversation becomes the "trigger" for numerous reminiscences, spectra of colors, sounds, fragrances, new stories and narrative sub-plots, raising issues of artistic creativity and outlining the unfinished intellectual portrait of the artist – more precisely, the portrait of the (woman) writer.

Along the porous boundary between dream and reality

"I'm writing because I seek to become whole, "says one of the female characters. Shakespeare's formula from A Midsummer Night's Dream is applied in the novel: the writer's pen gives shape to the unknown things by naming them, that is, "the airy nothing", or "the essence of the empty" (Lao Tzu’s void), places in the appropriate aesthetic form.

In the novel, the aesthetic form is defined through the relation of light and shade, the porous boundary between dream and reality, fiction and faction. As a result there are no clear contours, since the form takes on a certain amount of light and thus defines itself. This is how the subject "grasps" reality.

However, we are not talking about just any recipient of reality, the protagonist is an artist whose perception is "aesthetically adjusted". Artistic perception is simultaneously a creative process – based on the individual's perception – which is formative. Knowledge-based mastery of reality, or more precisely, "sorting out" the chaos of everyday impressions, is also a creative process.

Ez Eldin's playful, experimental book draws on a long line of avant-garde and postmodernist texts. It certainly represents a real gem for narratologists. Even though the book has been specified as belonging to the novel genre, it is possible to read it as a collection of stories using distinctive language of poetic prose. The narrator introduces us to the narrative – "making a pact" with the reader – and dramatically introduces us to space, events, but also to the consciousness of the various characters through the technique of free indirect speech.

Art becomes a gateway to a new dimension of reality: in this play of shadows, different spectra of reality are revealed – between the states of wakefulness and dreaming. Literature lists the layers of reality and reveals its deeper hidden and silenced structures, as Ez Eldin notes in her interviews. This is what this novel is really about.

Intertwining narratives

My reasons for initially comparing the novel to a common experience may be attributed not only to my own personal response to Ez Eldin's writing, but also to the noticeable intertwining of the narratives in dreamy, mythical and anthropological spaces, dreams that have the value of an embedded narrative or even attain mythological status.

The boundary between dream space and reality in the novel remains undefined, just as there is no clear contour between lightness and shadow. An embedded story in the process of being written, for example, is interrupted by the memory or associations of the one writing and thus flows into another narrative. The boundary between the real and the unreal is set exactly as it really is – indistinguishable.

But this seems to be precisely the hallmark of the relationship between art and life: does it really matter if something is real or not, if its value is set as real? For this reason, "Shadow Specters" is essentially a novel about the genesis and anatomy of writing and reading. This delicate boundary between the imaginary and the real directly determines the structure of the novel and vice versa. It is therefore important to refer to the structure of the novel in the context of narratology.

The narrator is at once intradiegetic, placed within the story itself, and omniscient and ubiquitous, both within the story and within the consciousness of the characters – violating all the rules and displacing the mise-en-scene at will.  In short, the storyteller cares nothing for the rules of storytelling: it is clear that the narrator belongs both to the world of the novel and to the world of the reader.

The storytelling relay meanders through the narrative, and we are no longer able to determine who exactly the narrative voice is, who precisely is writing and/or reading. "I often feel that I am not a woman of blood and flesh, but a thought that has occurred to some woman writer, "says Ez Eldin’s character. Indeed, this paradox of the narrative status turns the narrative into a meta-narrative, and the very novel into a novel about a novel.

Labyrinthine structure

If I had to come up with a metaphor for the formal structure of the novel, it would most likely be the symbol of infinity or better still a Moebius strip. Like the Moebius strip, "Shadow Specters" represents a kind of unorientable space where physical space flows into the psychic, and vice versa: memory is poured into a dream; the dream is sometimes mistaken for a memory; the narrator becomes a narrative figure, and the character becomes a thought that has occurred to the writer’s mind – a woman dreaming of being a rose, or a rose dreaming of being a woman. It is the space where being exists through its own negation – shadow resulting from light, cosmos resulting from chaos.

Reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, the novel has a labyrinthine structure. As if entering the rabbit hole, the reader jumps into the well of the writer’s mind, and through the looking glass. On the other side of reality, the hero of the story becomes the author or the storyteller gets "trapped" in the imaginary texture.

The novel is also inter-textually rich, however, referring not only to Lewis Carroll and his Alice, but also to Kafka – mostly on the subject of metamorphosis and Protean identity, which could certainly be widely discussed as an autonomous topic.

Totality of the narrative self

The novel's style is unique – literary impressionism a la Proust, with a phenomenological view of the world as being a spectrum of colors, sounds, music, smells, tastes. The bittersweet taste of Schweppes, the turquoise color of the sky, the smell of lemon or oleander are just some of the leitmotifs which "trigger" the flavored stream of memories: through perception and sensations that recall times past.

This literary impressionism – tokens of the past, sensory impressions – is a technique of reviving memories and lost experiences, in turn transformed by the knowledge of one who still remembers. These are truly fragments of experience – parts that are sought in order to fulfill the fantasy of wholeness, the totality of the narrative self.

To conclude, in this cacophonic limbo of mixed voices, I would like to introduce the notion of Ibn-Manzur’s book ark. The Medieval Arabic lexicographer Ibn-Manzur once compared his dictionary to Noah's ark, conjuring up the image of a book ship cutting the waves, colliding with words, words striking against one another, where meanings are mixed and released and new spaces occur, or conversely, a book ship that immerses both its characters and readers, devouring the words, which then float on the water like bodies, once their meaning is spent.

Marija M. Bulatovic

© Qantara.de 2020