That Smell and Notes From Prison (8 page)
Such is the road we have chosen.
No doubt the reader of today will smile along with me at
the tone of absolute self-confidence (reflecting, perhaps, an absolute lack of
self-confidence), at those grand phrases, “the truth of existence,” and
overhasty pronouncements, “the construction of socialism.” Such is the naïveté
of beginnings, which may also be a form of special pleading.
The days following my novel’s publication were hard. At that time,
Egyptian newspapers and magazines published nothing but the tired certainties of
socialist realism, never neglecting to mention the global play of forces, the
technological achievements, etc. (Today these dogmas are parroted by the most
backward, reactionary writers, an illustration of their worth and usefulness as
ideas.) The Arab nation, with Egypt in the vanguard, was indeed in a dogfight
with American imperialism and its Zionist stepdaughter, not to mention Arab
conservatives. So it was natural for me to wonder whether I wasn’t harming the
country by publishing my work under such conditions. Meanwhile, the threat of
imprisonment hung over my head.
Many readers took the novel as a butt for jokes and sarcasm. Others
exploited it for their own purposes. Abdel Qader Hatem took it to president
Gamal Abdel Nasser as proof of the Communists’ vulgarity and degeneracy. The
Islamic Conference came to the same conclusion. It pained me that my “caper” was
used to cast doubt on a movement whose struggles and sacrifices I have honored
for many decades. I experienced the same feelings when compelled to publish the
novel in 1968 in
Shi‘r
, a Beiruti magazine run by
Yusuf al-Khal and edited by
al-Nahar
newspaper —
neither of which were themselves above suspicion.
But I never regretted writing the novel or publishing it under such
circumstances. Nor did I regret the style I wrote it in or ever consider
renouncing it. True, I’m often troubled by the sense that I aborted a much
greater work. But I’m convinced that such were the limits of my abilities at
that time.
Self-criticism, an attention to the interior voice, recognition of
the real, an impatience with bourgeois sensitivities and fads — all these
continue to be at the basis of my work.
Confiscation didn’t put an end to the book for it was already out in
the world (a lesson the state apparatuses of Arab countries might learn from).
In 1969, while I was abroad, a publishing house called New Culture, once called
July Editorial, came out with a second edition of the novel, having removed
without my permission everything they imagined might offend the censor. It
wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the publisher had in fact used a peculiar
sort of censor, characteristic of that time, which was the “private editor” — a
freelancer who offered his services to authors and publishing houses alike.
After an agreement between New Culture and Contemporary Writings, the same
edition of the novel was republished in Cairo in 1971.
The current edition is the first complete edition to be published
since the initial, confiscated version: the version published by
Shi‘r
was not spared the usual scissors, cutting out
everything offensive to readers of delicate sensibilities. I have of course
corrected the original’s errors of syntax and grammar, as well as those of
negligence (calling a child “he” in one place and “she” in another, for
example). I’ve also corrected the epigraph by James Joyce. In the original
edition I claimed it was taken from
Ulysses
(I’d
come across the phrase in the
TLS
, which appears to
have misattributed it). When my novel was translated into English by Heinemann
in 1971, the translator Denys Johnson-Davies searched that novel long and hard
without success. Joyce experts eventually located its source in
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
SONALLAH IBRAHIM
CAIRO, 1986
*
See
Fi-l-Thaqafa al-Misriyya
[On Egyptian Culture] (Cairo: Dar
al-Fikr al-Jadid, 1955).
NOTES FROM PRISON
All footnotes in this translation are the
author’s,
from
Yawmiyyat al-Wahat
(2004).
1962
April
Cairo commits suicide. The fire of ’52. The
city that rose up and fell destructively on itself. Story of freedom in the
streets, among the people. The great, enormous city from every angle, its
birthing pains.
The hero and the masses — Plekhanov — the cult of
personality.
Torture: and since that time he feels that wherever he
walks, whether he’s coming in or going out, something will hit him, something
will shock him. If someone surprises him, his muscles tense. He expects to be
slapped or kicked.
June
The thing I seem furthest from, though I think
about it all the time and hope to achieve it, is to deal with man from within.
So many sentiments, so many strange and knotted interior operations.
Colors and their meanings. Red is love. Yellow jealousy.
Blue sadness. Green loyalty. White purity. Purple yearning.
The writer’s path is full of sacrifices; everything must
submit to his art. Pushkin wasted five years of his life chasing after his
girlfriend while she toyed with him. The writer must not allow anything to get
in the way of his work or his art. He is a saint and a martyr.
Here is the artist’s role in Egypt today. Not to write
something enjoyable merely for its aesthetic value. Not simply to lose oneself
in philosophical and intellectual issues. Not to live captive to one’s
individual experience, which could lead to loneliness or to feelings of
alienation and absurdity. Not to be content with recording —
impressionistically, neutrally, superficially — what happens in society.
Instead, the Egyptian artist must work actively and with others. He must dive
into the depths of the people and the depths of the individual. He must reveal
the way forward, he must choose the direction and change the direction. He must
lead and play a role in everyday life, armed with his technique, personal
experience, self-awareness, persistence, and the readiness to sacrifice.
The writer is responsible for every word he writes.
“When people talk, listen. Most people don’t listen.”
Advice given by Ernest Hemingway in a letter to a young writer.
“The Beacons,” at the Twenty-Second Congress of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union:
— Alexander Tvardovsky: “The hero of my tale, whom I
love with all my heart, whom I have tried to depict in all his beauty, who was,
is, and will be beautiful, is the truth.” Tolstoy.
— “Those writers who hurry to respond to the demands of
the day, who apprise us of contemporary events, deserve the sobriquet
‘skimmers.’ For them, the building of the Volga Canal doesn’t merit more than
two or three on-the-spot articles, dashed-off and superficial. A mirroring of
events and nothing else. But the same subject cost Vladimir Fomenko ten years of
hard work. I cannot hide my fear each time I see writers hurrying to spread the
news before the events and facts have matured in their minds, before they have
experienced a deep need to communicate with the reader.”
— Sholokhov: “A writer who speaks of collective farms
should know no less than a local agronomist.”
— I am a Communist first, a writer after that.
November
“The true material of film is the monologue,”
Eisenstein.
No real interest in people. Each looks out for himself.
Egotism. Where is the spirit of sacrifice, of consciousness-raising?
Psychological problems. Theft. The nature of conditions. Persistent belief
in the impossibility of a long-term sentence.
December
The mouth, like the prison, contains, when
closed, living things.
A story in two sections: in the first, people enter and
do what they do and their actions appear strange, spontaneous, random, futile —
in the second section, the same people behaving reasonably, or acting out an
interpretation of their previous behavior, or of the laws that governed all
those actions that had seemed random, futile, or accidental.
There is a law that governs everything, but we do not
know it. Again, the question of coercive conditions, of a power exterior to man.
The law of probabilities?
The epic theater of Brecht.
How little I know.
1963
February
One cannot say, with the Surrealists: The world
is going to pieces! The question of content is not out of bounds to the artist.
We can’t keep saying, “There’s no longer anything to write about.” The
conditions in our country do not allow it. A hundred topics await. A hundred
horizons open every day.
[. . .] a negative and dangerous aspect. We will pass
through a Stalinist experience. The new generation can’t take up politics as a
battle of ideas. It’s on the verge of becoming a generation of cowards. They’ve
rung down the curtain on the history of revolutionary struggle before the
revolution of 1952. [. . .] The men of the regime are sincere, but they have
been schooled in fear. How did revolutionary workers come to hate their country
and rejoice at its difficulties? . . . How have the consciences of so many been
destroyed by acts of terror? The humiliation of man. Three months of terror,
January–March, 1959.
*
Impressions of Mustafa Sweif’s book.
**
— Thought Under Pressure (or, the negative
aspect of extremist
engagement
). Speaking about what
he calls the renunciation of censorship over thought, Freud says some people
suffer an inability to set free their spontaneous thoughts. They cannot renounce
their critical capacity. This is because desirable thoughts (the artist’s
thoughts are of this type, since they are essentially libidinal) create a
violent resistance, which tries to bar their entry into consciousness. The
condition for poetic creation, according to Schiller, is very like what Freud
says. In one of his letters to Korner, in which he replies to a friend’s
complaint about the weakness of his creative powers, Schiller writes, “The
reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint which your
intellect imposes upon your imagination. Apparently it is not good if the
intellect examines too closely the ideas already pouring in at the gates.
Regarded in isolation, an idea may be quite insignificant, but it may acquire
importance from an idea that follows it; perhaps, in a certain collocation with
other ideas, which may seem equally absurd, it may be capable of furnishing a
very serviceable link. The intellect cannot judge all these ideas unless it can
consider them in connection with these other ideas. In the case of a creative
mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates,
and the ideas rush in like waves, and only then does it review and inspect the
multitude.” From Freud’s
The Interpretation of
Dreams
.
Al-Ahram
, February 13, 1963,
New Tendencies, “Real Cinema, No Actors, No Scripts, No Studios.” Since 1919,
some cinéastes have dreamt of a cinema not shot in the studio and requiring no
actors. Their idea was basically that the camera should be a tool in the
director’s hand just as the pen is for the writer. If the writer can rush with
his pen to record his reactions to events, why can’t the director do the same?
Why not take the camera into the street, into the places where people live? If
he happens to come across something he’d like to “comment” on, he grabs his
camera and records his impression. This is what the Soviet Vertov did, followed
by the American Flaherty, and then the two Frenchmen, Epstein and Vigo. Why did
they fail to establish a school? Contemporary French cinéaste Jean Rouch says,
“The failure stems from a confusion of reportage and drama. They recorded the
appearances of life as it is, while the real cinéaste relies on selection. When
we carry a camera around and run into something, we put ourselves physically in
front of that something. We ‘focus’ our lens on a particular facet of it, rather
than filming the whole. We shut out some elements and concentrate on others.
This is obvious from the composition of the shot. After shooting any number of
things, we have a film that might take twenty hours to show, from which we
select or edit ninety minutes’ worth. We ‘focus’ our idea about the subject,
just as a writer prepares his draft for publication.” Rouch applies this
principle to African societies in Abidjan (Ivory Coast). He was an ethnographer
sent to Africa by the French Anthropological Society and based on his experience
filming the social life of blacks, he developed a method that made the director
the sole author of the film and the reality he recorded its primary subject
matter. By selecting from among the elements of struggle in each instance, and
by foregrounding that choice by means of montage and cadrage, he transformed the
camera into a human eye, one that selects from reality whatever tallies with the
director’s point of view. In this way, he revealed a new consciousness of
reality, one we wouldn’t have experienced by looking at things while they were
mixed in with the events of ordinary life. Rouch’s films —
Chronicle of a Summer
;
Me, a Black Man
;
and
The Human Pyramid
— forge a new path for cinema,
which critics call “cinema verité,” or real cinema. (Zavattini’s experience.
Cameras in the square, facing the police station.)
May
The Plague
,
Albert Camus. (Last lines of the novel) “As he listened to the cries of joy
that rose above the town, Rieux remembered that this joy was still
threatened. He knew from reading his books what the happy crowd did not,
which is that the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes for good, that it
can sleep for decades in furniture or clothing, that it waits patiently in
bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs, and old papers, and that the day
might come when the plague would rouse its rats and send them out among the
people, for their immiseration or their instruction, when death would rip
them from life’s happy embrace.”
***