This panel explores how Egyptian authors writing during Hosni Mubarak's presidency (1981-2011) and since his ouster have engaged new literary forms and new media to confront the significant political and conceptual challenges facing the nation and its peoples during this period. The nation as both a political entity and an imaginary has figured largely in the Egyptian literary scene and the literature itself since the 19th-century Nahdah, and critical debates within Egypt about writers and works of literature-including their legitimacy and their monetary and symbolic value-are regularly couched in terms of their ideological and actual relationship to a national collective and to the state. Under Mubarak, the state made a concerted effort to reinvigorate Egypt's cultural scene and reinstated itself as a key actor in cultural activities. Mubarak's presidency also coincided with a period of rapid, widespread globalization that introduced new media-specifically satellite television and the internet-and thus gave Egyptian writers easier access to outside cultural influences and provided them with new creative outlets and means of transgressing borders. Since 2011, the state and writers have continued to alternately form alliances and clash in their efforts to determine the course of the nation and reach of the state, issues that frequently manifest in their literature.
While studies on contemporary Egyptian literature often focus on works produced either before or after the Jan. 25th revolution of 2011, this interdisciplinary panel purposefully takes a wider perspective and explores continuities and patterns across the two supposedly distinct periods. Taking up the literature and its producers, it investigates how Egyptian writers over this roughly 40-year period addressed shifting conceptions of Egyptian nationhood and the tumultuous changes ushered in with the "Arab Spring," examining formal, linguistic, and thematic innovation within texts, as well as effects on the larger cultural scene. We welcome papers that address Egyptian literature produced during this period (roughly 1981 to the present) on topics including (but not limited to):
o literary representations of Egyptian national identity and other expressions of collective and individual identities;
o reinterpretations of/play with classical Arabic literary forms;
o the role of the intellectual/writer vis-a-vis the nation and the state;
o crossings/transgressions of national and linguistic borders;
o the shock and disillusionment of post-Infitah life;
o questions of periodization in modern Egyptian literary history; and
o new literary trends and forms that emerged during this period.
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This paper reads Sonallah Ibrahim’s 1992 novel Zaat as a critical and satirical engagement with Egyptian media both old and new. Focusing in particular on the role of contemporary news media and “transmission” (bathth), on the one hand, and echoes of the premodern “heroic biography” (sirah), on the other, I argue that Zaat interrogates the adequacy of these forms for narrating the nation in the post-Infitah era. I focus first on a curious scene of “seeking,” “questing” or “investigation” (bahth) from the middle of the novel, in which Zaat travels to the rural Nile Delta village of Zefta to pay her respects at the funeral of an eight-year-old girl who was electrocuted by a shoddy lamppost. In the hands of an earlier Egyptian novelist such as Tawfiq al-Hakim, Fathi Ghanim, or Yusuf al-Qa‘id, I argue, the death of young Jihan might have served as the heart of a novel structured as a plea for justice from a corrupt and negligent Egyptian state. In Ibrahim’s work, by contrast, Jihan’s death is only one of many injustices with which Zaat collides in her quests through the halls of Mubarak-era Egyptian officialdom—including another, even longer “quest” for justice after purchasing a spoiled tin of olives.
Through close readings these and other scenes of “seeking” or “questing” (bahth) in Ibrahim’s novel, I show how Zaat misreads and misrecognizes herself as the potential hero of a sirah like the one dedicated to her namesake, the legendary Arab princess Dhat al-Himmah, and as a result of this misrecognition, she ends up crushed under the wheels of a shockingly banal, everyday authoritarianism. Zaat thus mourns the demise of an Arab socialist dream in a mode of tragic irony (per Northrop Frye’s definition of this term), yet I also argue that the point of such tragedy is not merely to inspire teary pathos in the reader, but rather to refocus her attention on the supposed inescapability of injustice, revealing its historicity and thus also its potential reversibility. In this way, Ibrahim adapts the communal, ethical, and pedagogical function of the sirah for the age of military dictatorship, structural adjustment, and globalization.
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Dr. Dima Ayoub
When Egyptian author Somaya Ramadan’s Awr?q al-narjis was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature shortly after its publication in 2001, prominent literary critic and poet Mahmud Khayrallah responded that she “does not know how to write Arabic.” The criticism, while certainly reflecting its author’s gendered entitlement to question the abilities of a woman author, also points to the multilingual nature of the book, in which Arabic and English freely mix, functioning as linguistic protagonists whose interplay is integral to the story itself. Translated by Marilyn Booth as Leaves of Narcissus in the same year of its publication, the novel invites us to consider the role of linguistic experimentation and multilingualism in recent Egyptian fiction, on the one hand, and the possibilities and limitations of translating such multilingual texts, on the other. While the question of domestication has predominated scholarship on translation between Arabic and English, this focus has had the effect of turning attention away from the potential of translated texts to resist, rather than absorb, domesticating tendencies. In the case of a multilingual text, the process of translation has typically been viewed as one that flattens the multilingual texture of the original. This paper considers Marilyn Booth’s English translation of Awr?q al-narjis as an example in which the original text “gains” through the process of its translation into English as its multilingual nature, far from being flattened, is brought to the fore. The paper ultimately asks how translation might be mobilized as a process through which a translation can stand alongside, rather than stand in for, the original text, and how authors like Ramadan are engaging—rather than avoiding—the multilingual reality of many Egyptians to interrogate the boundaries both of a text’s “original” language and its intended audience. Maddened by the inadequacy of a single language, Ramadan’s Awr?q al-narjis struggles to find its place in a geopolitically-grounded language like Arabic imposed by Khayrallah.
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Dr. Nancy Linthicum
Initially dismissed for turning away from the national collective, Egypt’s “nineties generation” of writers has since attracted scholarly attention challenging earlier claims that their literature was apolitical. These studies typically examine either the texts themselves (through close reading) or the larger literary field in which the writers participated (through sociology of literature). This paper takes a different approach by examining how these literary texts reflexively engage with significant shifts in the production and circulation of Egyptian literature that occurred during the 1990s and early 2000s. I argue that using this method allows us to see not only a change in literary style, but a major shift in the paradigm of authorship itself during this period. As a case study of these larger changes, this paper explores depictions of the figure of the author in Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s novel al-Fa‘il (2008; A Dog with No Tail, 2009), a quintessential example of nineties-generation fiction. Through close readings of key passages, I investigate the literary strategies Abu Golayyel employs to variously erase, blur, and signal the absence of the literary author’s traditional roles of reflecting and reforming the nation through his/her literature.
This semiautobiographical novel features a narrator-protagonist also named Hamdi Abu Golayyel, a young Bedouin who has moved away from his village in the Fayoum to Cairo, where he works as a day laborer and an aspiring writer. From the first page, Abu Golayyel’s sardonic humor provides sharp criticism of wide-scale state corruption in Egypt, especially as experienced by marginalized Bedouin communities. He uses the same dry wit to expose the ineffectiveness of the writer/intellectual who, in the form of the narrator, loudly—and insincerely—announces his intention and ability to counter such corruption. Abu Golayyel thus reveals authorship to be not a sacrosanct vocation, but a performance, and one that often is metafictional. Paying particular attention to modes of performance of authorship and allegories of reading in al-Fa‘il, I demonstrate how Abu Golayyel effectively demotes the literary author, rejecting the idea of author as enlightened voice of the nation. The text offers, instead, a new mode of authorship that engages the reader, through humor and metafiction, in dismantling outdated, ineffective notions of political engagement predicated on the nation, as it gestures toward new roles and collectivities defined outside of nationalist terms.
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Dr. Teresa Pepe
This paper investigates formal, linguistic, and thematic innovation in post-2011 Egyptian literature with a focus on the novel B?wl? (Paulo, Dar al-Tanw?r, 2016) by the Egyptian author Youssef Rakha (b. 1973). In particular, it focuses on Rakha’s use of mixed Arabic as a stylistic device and how it connects to his depiction of the main character, Paulo, as writer/intellectual in ways that subvert established conventions in modern Egyptian literature and the literary field.
The novel purports to be written in the form of a blog titled Al-asad ?al? al-?aqq (The Lion for Real) and published online on 14 August 2013, the date of the Raba?a massacre when Egyptian security forces killed thousands of supporters of the recently ousted president, Muhammad Mursi. The blog’s author, as well as the novel’s narrator and main character, is ?Amir, aka Paulo, a poet, director of a cultural agency and photographer who is well known among Cairo’s intellectual circles. Through the blog, Paulo confesses that he is, in reality, a serial killer and that he was an informant for Egyptian State Security during the 2011 uprisings, and he also reveals crimes he committed before and after the events of the Arab uprisings.
This paper first contextualizes Rakha’s literary work by establishing the author as part of a generation of authors who entered the literary field in the 1990s, when Rakha experimented first with private publishing and then with publishing on the Internet. Then, it provides close readings of a selection of passages from the novel B?wl? and examines how mixed Arabic is used in the text, focusing on choices of lexicon, syntax, figures of speech, and tone of narration. Finally, the paper connects Rakha’s use of mixed-style Arabic to his depiction of the main character Paulo, a crazy murderer who hides behind the mask of a distinguished intellectual. In this way, the paper demonstrates how Rakha’s novel subverts the nahdawi model of the writer/intellectual as “conscience of the nation” and the idea that literature should conform to certain linguistic norms, norms that have governed the Egyptian literary field until recent years.
