That Smell and Notes From Prison (7 page)
We would go by tram, taking it from the Midan just before it
turned into Zaher Street. I loved that peaceful street, lined with trees whose
branches interlaced overhead in the center of the street, veiling it from the
light. And I loved the sound of the trolley pole clearing its path through the
branches of the trees. Still, the tram was very fast and we would lift our faces
into the afternoon breeze and my father held his tarboosh to make sure it didn’t
fly off. Then the street ended and the tram turned, swaying a little, into the
wide open Midan, slowing its speed and finally stopping in front of the mosque.
I would gaze into that big garden, which kept sloping away until it finally
disappeared from the view of the tram riders. And through the great stone arches
of the mosque wall I would see the red and blue robes of children playing in the
garden and keep my eyes on them as the tram slipped back into motion, circling
the mosque. Then the mosque and its garden would disappear all at once and my
father put his hand on my bare knee while the tram turned sharply past narrow
al-Khalig Street and I wished that our tram was the Khalig Street tram so that
we could ride between the narrow walls with my father’s hand stretched out
nearly touching the houses. We would get off at Faggala and my father would take
me with his right hand as we crossed the street. We set off down an alley
bordered by a high white wall with tree branches swaying over it and the street
would grow dark, though the sun was still in the sky, and I understood why when
I looked up and saw thick clouds of smoke coming together and then quickly
coming apart and my father would say it was the smoke of trains coming from Bab
al-Hadid. Then the street ended and the house appeared. My father sat on the
bawwab’s bench while I went up the long staircase, passing by the doors with
their smells of cooking oil. Afterward, my father and I left along the same
alley, walking next to the white wall, and I would spot the big bells behind it.
The street was hidden in shadows and empty except for us and at the far end a
patch of light turned into a tobacconist’s shop. We stopped at the entrance,
blocked by a big high display case. I pressed my face against the cloudy glass
and stared at the boxes of sweets and chocolates. I saw my father’s hand dip
into his pants pocket. He took out some coins and cast them on top of the glass
counter, right at the level of my head, and then we would leave the shop and
cross the street to the tram stop. I was cold and pressed myself against my
father and he spread out the collar of his jacket to cover his chest and we
stood alone on the station platform. The tram came and we got on the covered
back car and huddled in the corner with my father’s warm hand on my bare knee
and the tram would begin the journey back, passing by Khalig Street, then
turning abruptly to the right, the houses on our left disappearing and a dark
wide open space rolling out in front of us. I was afraid that I would fall in
and held onto my father tightly. Then my eyes got used to the dark and I made
out the big Midan with the large form of the mosque in the middle and the tram
would circle the mosque, passing a shuttered cinema that we went to in the
summer with my mother, and then drive down tree-lined Zaher Street while I
leaned my head against the wooden guardrail behind me and enjoyed the rushing
speed, watching my father close his eyes against the strong wind in our
faces.
I took the tram to the church and turned into the neighboring street
that was crowded and full of noise. The street ended, I turned to the right. The
house I remembered was very high with wide wooden balconies. My mother jumped
from one of those balconies, landing on the one below. I looked from house to
house. They were all low and only one of them had wooden balconies. That must be
the one, I thought. I walked slowly toward it. The balconies were small and the
lobby was cramped. The lobby I remembered was spacious. I went through the lobby
and slowly climbed the stairs, coming to the top sooner than I expected. There
was a small room there and I knocked on the door. Come in, I heard a female
voice say. I pushed open the door and stood in the entrance. There were three
women draped in black sitting cross-legged on a bed in the corner. One rose and
came to me, saying, Who are you? I recognized my grandmother. I spoke my name in
a low voice and she embraced me and kissed me on the cheek. Sit down, she said.
I sat on a wooden chair by the door. My grandmother pointed to the younger of
the two women. This is your aunt, she said. My aunt rose and kissed me on the
cheek. Then she pointed to the other woman. This is my aunt, she said. I rose
and picked up my chair and brought it closer to them, setting it down next to
the bed. My grandmother’s aunt said, This neighborhood is falling apart. My
grandmother said, As soon as I saw you, I knew it was you. My aunt said, We were
just saying we could meet the two of them on a bus and have no idea. My
grandmother picked up the transistor and said, It’s story-time. A somber voice
on the radio announced another episode of “The Shadow.” The episode began with a
young man’s voice saying tearfully: How can I live when I know my father is a
murderer? I sat and listened in silence. All the women gazed at the radio.
Fifteen minutes passed, the episode ended, and my grandmother got up to pray.
Some children came into the room and my aunt said to them, This is the son of
your aunt, may God have mercy on her. She looked at me from the corner of her
eye. I said nothing. I wanted to know exactly when and where my mother had died.
My grandmother finished her prayers and sat next to me. When exactly did my
mother die? I asked her. One week ago tomorrow, she said. Where? At her father’s
house, she said. I pointed to my head and said, How was she? She read the
newspapers and went on about everything better than any of us and she knew what
was going to happen and it didn’t bother her, my grandmother’s aunt said. Then
she got sick all of a sudden and wouldn’t see the doctor, my grandmother said.
She wouldn’t take any medicine. She got thinner and thinner and finally stopped
eating. My aunt said, On the last day she asked for a cup of water and when she
drank it she fell down dead. We were silent. My grandmother said, Even at the
end, she didn’t want to see me and she didn’t want to see any of you. I looked
at my watch. The policeman would come soon. I stood up and said, I have to go
now. I wished them goodbye. I went downstairs and walked out of the house, then
followed some side streets back to Midan Ramses, where I headed for the metro
station.
Introduction to the 1986 edition of
That
Smell
The great Yahya Haqqi asked me, when I met him recently
at some function or other, whether I remembered his criticism of my first novel,
That Smell
, just after its publication in 1966.
When I said yes, he asked my opinion now, almost two decades later, of what he’d
said and of my novel more generally. I’d forgotten almost everything to do with
the book. Years had passed since the last time I’d read it. I’m not in the habit
of going back to previous work — reading like that bores me when it doesn’t lead
to depression. As for Yahya Haqqi’s criticism, I will never forget it.
I’d given the manuscript to a shabby little printer in El Zaher
district, during one of those rare moments in the history of modern Egypt when
martial law was lifted and a book didn’t require prior approval from the censor
before being given to a printer. Officially, at least. In fact, the censor kept
his office and his job as before. The only difference was that his door no
longer had a sign on it, and the confiscation of books didn’t happen before the
printing, but afterward.
Which is what happened to my novel. The printer had hardly finished
before the book was seized. I don’t remember if I was summoned to the chief
censor’s office or if I went there on my own to complain. In any case, I met the
late Talat Khalid — one of the more zealous disciples of the Minister of
Information, Abdel Qader Hatem — who had called in some departmental bigwigs to
enjoy the spectacle. Khalid had a copy of the confiscated novel in front of him,
with the margins of most pages marked in red. He asked me, contemptuously, “Why
does the hero refuse to sleep with the prostitute his friend brings him? Is the
hero impotent?”
I wasn’t especially interested in arguing the point. I’d managed to
rescue a few of the confiscated copies and began distributing them to writer
friends and journalists, asking those with some influence to get the novel
released. The late Zaki Murad and I went to see Ahmad Hamrush, then
editor-in-chief of
Ruz al-Yusuf
. Hamrush welcomed me
very warmly and showed me proofs of the magazine’s new issue, which included a
short essay by him on my novel titled “The Language of the Age.” When I told him
about the confiscation he was visibly surprised. He picked up the phone and
called his friend Hamdi Hafiz in the Information Bureau; he listened for a
moment, and then without replacing the receiver he called the magazine’s printer
and requested the article be removed.
The news didn’t reach most writers and journalists in time, however.
A number of magazines and newspapers published reviews, all while the book
reposed in the storehouses of the Ministry of Interior.
Yahya Haqqi was one of those to whom I gave a copy of the book. We’d
become acquainted a few months earlier, following my release from prison in the
middle of 1964. I went to his office at
al-Majalla
,
where he was editor-in-chief. He’d opened the magazine’s doors to all writers,
especially young ones, and would usher them behind the expensive wooden desk at
the center of his room, making do with a comfortable leather armchair placed to
one side. The first time we met, I brought him my piece on a recent book by
Stephen Spender, the British literary critic. I sat and read the article aloud
and Haqqi listened intently, studying me with his intelligent eyes and gently
correcting my errors of pronunciation. When I’d finished reading, he said he’d
take it. It was the first thing I published after my release from prison and I
made ten guineas, which covered a month’s expenses.
I had gone to see Haqqi with a copy of
That
Smell
. He took it from me in a friendly fashion and after reading the
title he said, very amiably, that the room was perfumed by the pleasant
fragrance emanating from its title.
But it wasn’t long before he realized his mistake and wrote a
violent review in his weekly column for
al-Masa’
,
where he said:
I am still distressed by this short
novel whose reputation has recently become notorious in literary circles. It
might have been counted among our best productions had its author not shown such
imprudence and lack of good taste. Not content to show us his hero masturbating
(if the matter had ended there it would have been of little importance), he also
describes the hero’s return a day later to where the traces of his sperm lie on
the ground. This physiological description absolutely nauseated me, and it
prevented me from enjoying the story despite its skillful telling. I am not
condemning its morality, but its lack of sensibility, its lowness, its
vulgarity. Here is the fault that should have been removed. The reader should
have been spared such filth.
So the great writer was asking my opinion of what he
called, in his article, my “physiological” style. But while we talked, I began
to think about the incident in broader terms. I told him I felt that I was only
now learning how to write. Each new book revealed something new to me about the
art, exposing the limits of my abilities, my weak points. And it increased my
esteem for those writers who boldly confront the blank page, bristling with the
weapons of their craft. This is not at all how I felt when I began writing.
When I wrote
That Smell
, I had just
gotten out of prison and was under house arrest, which required me to be at home
from dusk to dawn. I spent the rest of the day getting to know the world I’d
been away from for more than five years. As soon as I was back in my room, I
rushed to record, in quick sketches, all those events and sights that had made
an impression on me, that seemed to me completely out of the ordinary. Then I
would put the diaries aside and get back to the novel I’d begun in prison, a
novel of childhood. I planned for it to consist of a number of independent short
stories, connected by the central characters and general theme. I’d finished a
few chapters and managed to smuggle them out with the help of my friend Hussein
Abd Rabbo, who took them with him upon his own release.
I would turn to the novel but find myself unable to get on with it.
I had lost the fire that lit my pen while in prison. The new reality consumed
me. And again the familiar question arose: What should I write, how should I
write it?
I say “again” because this question was always with me during my
time in prison, from the moment I chose to dedicate my life to writing. There
were moments I couldn’t have cared less about the first half of the question. In
the naïveté and enthusiasm of youth, I rebelled against the idea of a necessary
relation between form and content in the work of art (a necessity expounded by
Mahmoud al-Alim and Abd al-Azeem Anis in their famous articles,
*
which we were
all very excited by in the fifties). Rebellion was the spirit of the age, after
all.
The early sixties were a fertile time in politics, in art, in life.
It was the moment when a new middle class emerged in Egypt and other countries
of the Third World. These countries, benefiting from a favorable balance of
global forces, dealt a decisive blow to the old and collapsing colonial order,
and fashioned a dream of social justice they weren’t able to realize. The
socialist movement awoke to the evils of idolatrous individualism and seemed
prepared to draw the necessary conclusions. Man had walked on the moon. Sexual
behavior went under the microscope, revealing important truths — for example,
that a female might naturally enjoy up to fifty orgasms in one night compared to
two or three for the average poor male.
From behind the walls of al-Wahat Prison, I and my friends, Kamal
al-Qilish, Rauf Mas‘ad, and Abdel Hakim Qasim, enthusiastically followed Soviet
poets — the young poets Yevtushenko and Voznesensky, as well as the older
Tvardovsky — as they exploded conventional forms. We also followed the
experiments in spontaneous writing and Op Art in America, and the
nouveau roman
craze in France. Cairene magazines were
full of news about literary experiments all over the world. The regime’s covert,
conservative opposition, which actually controlled publishing and media outlets
in the country, cleverly promoted the works of Beckett, Ionesco, and
Dürrenmatt.
Rebellion was the fuel and experimentalism was the slogan of the
day. Naguib Mahfouz put Balzac aside and helped the Arabic novel leapfrog an
entire century. New names rose to prominence: Edward Kharrat, Ghalib Halasa,
Bahaa Taher, Sulaiman Fayyad, Ibrahim Aslan, Yahya al-Taher Abdallah, and
others. I thought I’d found my own path when I discovered Hemingway, by way of
two books that managed to breach the walls of al-Wahat. The first was by Carlos
Baker and the second was a collection of essays — there was an especially good
one by an older Soviet critic whose name I’ve forgotten — analyzing the great
American writer’s techniques. I put my faith in these techniques right away (I
still do, in certain respects), the most important of which were economy and
restraint. Set against the conventionally flabby eloquence of Arabic literature,
this “iceberg” style acquired a special sheen. It was under the influence of
Hemingway that I began working on my still unfinished novel of childhood.
In the furnished room I rented after my release in the neighborhood
of Heliopolis, I would leaf distractedly through the drafts of that novel,
asking myself what the point was of writing something that didn’t engage the
struggle against imperialism, the effort to build socialism, and all the
difficulties these efforts brought in their train: terror, torture, prison,
death, personal misery.
Then one night I won’t forget I glanced over the diary, composed in
a telegraphic style, which I wrote in every night after the policeman’s
departure. There were only a few entries, about sixteen days as I remember. I
read the whole thing, then shivered with excitement. There was a buried current
running through that telegraphic style, a style that never stopped for
self-examination, didn’t bother to search for
le mot
juste
, nor to make sure that the language was neat and tidy, nor that
all ugliness such as might shock delicate sensibilities had been scrubbed away.
There was
beauty
in such feeble sentences as: “The
writer said that Maupassant said that the artist must create a world that is
more beautiful and more simple than our own.” And there was a
beauty
in ugly actions, like passing gas in a
bourgeois living room.
Wasn’t a bit of ugliness necessary to expose an equivalent ugliness
in “physiological” acts like beating an unarmed man to death, or shoving a tire
pump up his anus, or electric cords into his penis? All because he held a
contrary opinion, or defended his freedom and sense of nationalism? Why is it
stipulated that we write only about flowers and perfume when shit fills the
streets, when sewage water covers the earth and everyone smells it? Or that we
only write about creatures seemingly without genitals, so that we don’t violate
the supposed decency of readers who actually know more about sex than we do?
Reading my brief diaries, I felt that here was the raw material for
a work of art. It only needed some arranging and polishing. I felt that I’d
finally found my own voice.
I found work at a bookshop selling foreign books (Rauf Mas‘ad and
Abdel Hakim Qasim later graduated from the same institution). My job required
that I man the store all day, so days off were the only time I had for serious
writing. I still remember the morning in Ezbekieh Gardens when I wrote the first
page of
That Smell
. But I quickly saw that I
couldn’t go on in this way. I quit work and a friend of mine, Dr. Jamal Saber
Gabra, provided me with an unused, book-filled apartment of his in Heliopolis.
Surrounded by the writings of archaeologist Sami Gabra (and the tomes of the
sainted martyrs), and drawing moral support from my old friends Rauf Mas‘ad and
Kamal al-Qilish, I worked diligently on my first novel for three months.
I decided to keep the short-winded style that characterized my
diaries, though I carefully rearranged their contents, and I used endnotes to
clarify a few things. I called the manuscript “The Rotten Smell in My Nose.”
Yusuf Idriss, whom I had known since the mid-fifties, opposed the
idea of endnotes. He thought they were a bit too innovative and convinced me to
move them into the main text. He also argued against the title I’d chosen. In
the psychiatric clinic he’d just opened in Midan Giza we came up with “That
Smell.” He was also kind enough to write an introduction.
Finally, I handed the novel over to a printer, paying him twenty
guineas to publish it. The illustrator Mustafa Hussein gave me the design for
the cover and Yusuf Idriss’s introduction opened the book. There was also a
short text on the cover, a kind of manifesto, signed by Kamal al-Qilish, Rauf
Mas‘ad, and Abdel Hakim Qasim:
If you do not like the novel now between your hands, the
fault isn’t ours. It is instead the fault of our cultural moment, dominated as
it has been for many years by works of shallowness, naïveté, and
conventionalism. To shatter this climate of artistic stagnation, we must turn to
the kind of sincere and sometimes agonized writing you find here.
It is in such straits that we introduce
this novel by the young writer Sonallah Ibrahim. It will be followed by Nabil
Badran’s play, “The Blacks,” short stories by Kamal al-Qilish, Ahmad Hashem
al-Sharif, and Abdel Hakim Qasim, plays by Rauf Mas‘ad, and poems by Muhammad
Hammam.
These unfamiliar names will introduce
an equally unfamiliar art. An art that expresses the spirit of the age and the
experience of a generation. An age in which distances and boundaries have
vanished, brilliant horizons have opened while dangers threaten, illusions have
crumbled and man has penetrated into the truth of existence. A generation born
in the shadow of monarchy and feudalism, that went out marching to demand the
fall of the King and the British, and that embraced the July Revolution with
words and deeds. A generation that has witnessed the collapse of monarchy and
capitalism and the construction of socialism — all this in a few short years. A
rich and profound experience, full of contradictions and crises, a growing sense
of self and knowledge of self. All this requires serious, courageous expression
to articulate these experiences creatively and innovatively.