That Smell and Notes From Prison (2 page)

“Prison was my university,” Ibrahim writes in his own introduction
to the
Notes
, and indeed the entries read at times
like a syllabus, or a wish list for future reading. “Must read
Ulysses
,” he writes in December 1962, when he was
twenty-five years old. And three months later, “Must read Proust.” The diaries
have relatively little to say about prison routine or with Ibrahim’s personal
life, in part because he feared the notes might be seized and used against him.
Nevertheless, a picture does emerge between the lines of an intensely
intellectual environment. Most of the Communists’ reading seems to have been
acquired through the prison guards, who occasionally spent a week in Cairo or
Alexandria and were easily bribed. Cultural supplements from Cairene newspapers
formed a large part of the prisoners’ reading. An ex-leader of the party, Henri
Curiel, who arranged for the prisoners’ legal defense from his exile in Paris,
also sent copies of
La Nouvelle Critique
, which one
of the French-speaking inmates would translate for the rest. The arrival of
Naguib Mahfouz’s
The Cairo Trilogy
caused such
excitement that the prisoners drew up a waiting list for readers. During the
day, the inmates buried their library in the sand outside the cells. (This same
bookish and clandestine milieu was cultivated by Muslim Brotherhood prisoners,
who shared jails with the Communists, though the two groups kept mostly to
themselves. Indeed, much of modern Egyptian intellectual history was born in
Nasser’s prisons.)

Three central interests stand out in Ibrahim’s diaries. The first is
the importance of literature from the USSR. Soviet culture was viewed by the
Egyptian Communists as a mirror, a model, and a warning. It was more advanced,
but also more damaged than their own. The diary is full of the news about
Novy Mir
, the Soviet monthly that briefly served as a
forum for liberal opposition in the wake of de-Stalinization. For fathomable
reasons, one of the first books Ibrahim read after his release is Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, first
published in
Novy Mir
in 1962. There are several
entries that hint at connections Ibrahim was making between Soviet and Egyptian
experience, often by way of citation rather than commentary. In May of 1963, he
reproduces a passage by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, among the most famous poets in the
world at the time (now hardly read), whose memoirs were being serialized in the
French magazine
L’Express
: “To explain away the cult
of Stalin’s personality by saying that it was imposed by force is, to say the
least, rather naïve,” Yevtushenko writes. “Many genuine Bolsheviks arrested at
that time refused to believe that this had happened with his knowledge, still
less on his personal instructions. Some of them, after being tortured, traced
the words ‘Long Live Stalin’ in their own blood on the walls of their prison.”
Given what Ibrahim says elsewhere about the Egyptian Communists’ perverse
relation to Nasser, which he describes as “absolute support from our side;
repression and murder from his side,” it is easy to see why this particular
anecdote jumped out at him.

Ibrahim’s dilemma might be thought of in this way: how to write
oppositional art when the regime in power has already stolen your best lines?
The attractiveness of Yevtushenko, it would seem, is that he briefly supplied a
model for how one might remain a Communist despite communism — or, as he writes
in his memoir, how one maintains “faith in the original purity of the
revolutionary idea despite all the filth that has since desecrated it.” It is
from the Soviet writers that Ibrahim gets his obsession with “telling the
truth,” an idea that crops up incessantly in the writings of Yevtushenko and
others quoted in the
Notes
. For the Soviets, this
meant telling the truth about Stalin and the Gulag. For Ibrahim, it meant
telling the truth about Nasserism.

But what is the style of truth telling? Here is where the second,
somewhat more surprising feature of these diaries appears, their immersion in
American literature and especially in Hemingway. A long series of notes from
June 1963 concern Carlos Baker’s book,
Hemingway, the
Writer as Artist
, which had been recently translated into Arabic by
the Palestinian scholar Ihsan Abbas. Ibrahim’s notes focus on
The Green Hills of Africa
, Hemingway’s 1935 account of
a hunting trip on the Serengeti Plain. Ibrahim quotes from Baker’s citation of a
long discussion between Hemingway and Pop, another hunter, where they discuss
what it’s like to witness a revolution. The conversation also serves as a
statement of literary method. Hemingway as himself says about revolutions,

It’s very hard to get anything true on anything you haven’t
seen yourself because the ones that fail have such a bad press and the winners
always lie so. Then you can only really follow anything in places where you
speak the language. That limits you of course. That’s why I would never go to
Russia. When you can’t overhear it’s no good. All you get are handouts and
sight-seeing. Any one who knows a foreign language in any country is damned
liable to lie to you. . . . If I ever write anything about this, it will just be
landscape painting until I know something about it. Your first seeing of a
country is a very valuable one. Probably more valuable to yourself than to any
one else, is the hell of it. But you ought to always write it to try to get it
stated. No matter what you do with it.

You ought to always write it to try
to get it stated.
The phrase is underlined in Ibrahim’s diary. The
Arabic translation reads, “
Uktub, uthbit ma tarahu wa-ma
tasma‘uhu
”: “Write, set down what you see and hear.” It is clear that
Ibrahim’s minimalism owes something to Hemingway, a fact I have tried to keep in
mind in my own translation. Might this iconic, endlessly imitated style come
back to English readers, made strange and new after a detour through Cairo?
Ibrahim takes other tips from Hemingway. The technique of italicized flashback,
used several times in
That Smell
, is borrowed from
Hemingway’s short story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” But what appears to have
struck Ibrahim most about Hemingway is the American writer’s commitment to the
quotidian, to the truth of what he sees and hears. Ibrahim proves that this
style, unbuttressed by commentary, could make its own revolutionary statement.
(Equally interesting, of course, is what Ibrahim doesn’t take from Hemingway:
macho posturing is not in his narrator’s repertoire.)

The third central concern of these notebooks is with the varieties
of realism. This was a live issue in Egyptian literary circles at the time.
Socialist realism was a dominant mode of the previous decade, most notably in
Abd al-Rahman al-Sharaqwi’s
The Earth
(1952), a
novel of class conflict in a village of the Nile Delta.
The
Earth
was celebrated by proponents of
engagé
literature and spawned a host of imitators. But by the early sixties, in
the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, socialist realism was considered by many,
even on the left, as the house style of Stalinism. Another strain of realism,
what we might call classical realism, culminated in the novels of Naguib
Mahfouz. His suite of historical fictions,
The
Cairo Trilogy
,
is a
minute and comprehensive depiction of Egyptian life in the first half of the
twentieth century, refracted through the prism of a well-to-do family. But the
conventions of classical realism, which presume a relatively stable class system
to anchor its ambitious survey of social life, were unable to represent the
shifts brought about by Nasser’s reforms. The explosion of a lower middle-class
population, largely employed by the expansionist state, and the resultant
consumer society with its characteristic entertainments (movies, television,
popular clubs) and objects of desire (refrigerators, electronics, suits), proved
too much new material to squeeze into the strictures of Mahfouzian technique. In
order for realism to remain realistic — this is Ibrahim’s insight — it would
have to become experimental.

In this sense,
Notes from Prison
can be
read as a late episode in the debate between Realism and Modernism among
intellectuals such as Georg Lukács, Berthold Brecht, and Walter Benjamin during
the 1930s and ’40s — the great age of speculation about the relationship between
politics and literature. Those debates were still alive in the pages of
La Nouvelle Critique
, albeit in simplified form, and
both Lukács and Brecht make appearances in Ibrahim’s reading diary. For these
writers the chief question was how to create a modern art form that would, in
Marx’s words, force mankind “to face with sober senses the real conditions of
their lives and their relations with fellow men” — with the ambition,
ultimately, to transform those conditions. If this goal now seems grandiose,
that speaks to the reduced place literature holds in our own life rather than a
flaw in the ambition. Ibrahim’s response to this question, as evidenced by the
Notes
and his novel, was to focus on the terrain
of the everyday. His fiction suggests that it is within the workday routine of
gossip, casual consumption, and bodily experience — washing, eating, sex — that
politics are most immediately felt and known. This is true even or especially
when what one feels most of all is the absence of politics. It is his concern
for the quotidian that seems to explain Ibrahim’s notes on the films of Italian
Neo-Realism and cinema verité. And indeed the narrator of
That Smell
acts as a kind of camera, recording the life around him
while abstaining from comment.

Except in a few cases, Ibrahim did not have access to the texts
mentioned in the
Notes
in the original language, or
even in translation. He did not read the novels or poems, and did not see the
films that he worried over for hundreds of pages. Instead, he imagined them as
they were described or excerpted in the pages of Cairo’s cultural supplements,
French journals, and American magazines. (For this edition, I have tried to
locate the works cited by Ibrahim, but have based my translations on the Arabic
of the
Notes
, even when that version is different
from the original.) Ibrahim’s Hemingway is, in this sense, a dream of Hemingway,
a famous style filtered through a scrim of secondary and tertiary literature, as
well as translations. Perhaps this way of reading is what made it easy for
Ibrahim to pick and choose what he found useful for his own work. To cobble
together bits of Solzhenitsyn with bits of
The Green Hills
of Africa
and bits of other things and come up with a style unique in
Arabic literature. This search for models — “influence” is too passive a word to
describe what Ibrahim is doing; it is more like bricolage — was made under
severe restrictions. His library was limited to whatever the jailers picked up
in the kiosks, or friends on the outside thought would be good for him to read.
It is not by chance that in later work such as
The
Committee
or
Zaat
, the protagonists are
literary scavengers, collectors of ephemera, people who cannot help picking up
the newspaper but never entirely believe what they read there.

In October of 2003, Ibrahim was given the Arab Novel Award, an honor
bestowed by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. To the surprise of many in the
audience, familiar with his reputation as a dissident, Ibrahim attended the
ceremony and delivered a now legendary speech. Instead of a gracious acceptance,
his speech was an uncompromising attack on the Mubarak regime. In Egypt, Ibrahim
observed, “We no longer have any theater, cinema, scientific research, or
education. Instead, we have festivals and the lies of television.” He went on,
“Corruption and robbery are everywhere, but whoever speaks out is interrogated,
beaten, and tortured.” In view of this “catastrophe” Ibrahim had no choice but
to refuse the prize, “for it was awarded by a government that, in my opinion,
lacks the credibility to bestow it.” A little less than eight years later, that
regime — or at least its chief officer — was toppled. The role of artists and
intellectuals in the new Egypt is far from clear. The state’s powers of coercion
are formidable and it is possible the old ways of doing things will survive with
minor adjustments (increased subsidies for “Islamic” art, for example). But
whatever the outcome of the recent revolts,
That Smell
will remain as an example of self-critical artistry at work in a moment
of historical crisis. I hope it may also find an audience in translation.

ROBYN CRESWELL

THAT SMELL

This race and this country and this life produced me. . . . I
shall express myself as I am.

— James Joyce,
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man