Voice of the Middle East?
Published 26 February 2007
Alaa Al Aswany's controversial novel The Yacoubian Building has taken the Arab world by storm. He talks to Rachel Aspden.
Reuters
"You hate Egypt?" a disbelieving aristocratic roué demands of his impoverished secretary in Alaa Al Aswany's novel The Yacoubian Building.
"Of course," she replies, shocked that he had to ask.
In Cairo, this is a dangerous sentiment - and Al Aswany's portrayal of homosexuality, Islam ism, poverty, exploitation and corruption is doubly so. Writers in Egypt are caught in a tug-of-war between an autocratic government intolerant of criticism and dissent, and an increasingly powerful Islamist movement vio ently opposed to any "affront to public morality".
The space between them is narrow. In the past few years, writers have been imprisoned, beaten, fined and had their books pulped by government agencies - and suffered harassment, attacks and even murder at the hands of Islamists. But The Yacoubian Building slipped through, selling hundreds of thousands of copies since its first publication in 2002, and becoming the bestselling Arabic novel in recent history. In 2006, when a lavish film adaptation was released, 112 MPs demanded that the film be censored for "spreading obscenity and debauchery".
Controversy, especially involving sex and Islamists, sells. The Yacoubian Building, in an excellent translation by Humphrey Davies, has been picked up by HarperCollins for a rare publication in the west. Like The Bookseller of Kabul and last year's Booker-shortlisted In the Country of Men, it will become famous for offering, as the New York Review of Books put it, "an amazing glimpse" into Middle Eastern society and culture. Ominously, President Bush's adviser Karen Hughes has it on her bedside table.
But when I meet Al Aswany in the plush quiet of a Kensington hotel, he is keen to distance himself from the furore. "I am not a political novelist," he says, exhaling slow rolls of cigarette smoke. "I am a political columnist" - he has a monthly column in the opposition paper Al-Arabi - "and I am an activist with [the anti-government movement] Kifaya. But I get up and write from 6.30am to 10.30am, five or six days a week. I don't do this for politics."
The routine is imposed by Al Aswany's extra-literary responsibilities: he is an American-trained dentist whose surgery used to be in the real-life Yacoubian Building in Cairo's bustling, scruffy Downtown. Before that, it housed the offices of his father, a lawyer, political activist and novelist. Abbas Al Aswany gave his son a liberal, cosmopolitan upbringing, surrounded by books and foreign friends (the kind of upbringing shared by his upper-class characters Zaki Bey el Dessouki and Hatim Rasheed, the only ones who do not "hate Egypt") - and shaped both his political views and his writing style.
"He told me you must have another profession, then you are free to write what you want," remembers Al Aswany, who struggles with the Arab world's lax copyright laws, low print runs and meagre royalties - he estimates the royalties from his Arabic-language sales have covered the coffee and cigarettes he consumed while writing this, his second full-length novel. "And he also taught me about realism. For the past two decades there's been too much experimentalism in Arabic literature."
I ask him for an example. "Arab writers are too influenced by Europe. You get these stories - 'I just got home and found my wife making sex to a cockroach' - something like that," he says, his English gone awry with outrage. "Dentistry is an applied science - when I practise it I must copy what I learned in the States. But when I write about my people and to my people, I must keep my own voice."
This voice is easy-going, anecdotal, comic, occasionally sentimental, and given to the kind of melodramatic scenes - screaming matches between grumpy elderly siblings; unfaithful husbands accused by wives or sisters - beloved by audiences of Egypt's annual Ramadan TV melodramas. These are not fashionable qualities. Its critics accuse The Yacoubian Building of being both formally and, despite its taboo-breaking reputation, politically conservative: of "having its socio-progressive cake and not only eating it, but smacking its frosting-flecked lips in delight", according to one American reviewer.
Al Aswany brushes these criticisms off. "I've been accused of being too traditional," he says. "But it is very easy to write a text that no one understands. I write for the people, and I trust they can feel and taste literature." The astonishing success of his novel has brought a heavy additional burden: some readers expect it to provide answers to the combined troubles of the Arabic novel and the Middle East's rotten political sphere. "In fiction, you don't have to judge - the point of literature is to understand rather than to judge," says Al Aswany, wearily.
But politics - and their corollary, Egypt's gnawing social unrest - are indivisible from The Yacoubian Building. Set in and around the eponymous apartment building, its "cast of characters" spans Egypt's social divides, from a French-speaking newspaper editor to a one-legged Coptic manservant. At the heart of the book, however, are the twin stories of the poor sweethearts Busayna el Sayed and Taha el Shazli, the doorman's son. While Busayna, who is forced into unsavoury relationships to feed her family, is eventually rescued by an elderly lover, Taha is unfairly rejected from the police academy, falls in with extremists, is brutally abused by the police, and dies pursuing jihad against his tormentors.
Given Egyptian Islamists' fraught relations with the secular intelligentsia, it would have been easy for Al Aswany to characterise Taha as a mindless fanatic. But the young man is sympathetically drawn - the self-respect he finds in Islamism, having been denied it in a corrupt and brutal mainstream society, are reported in a matter-of-fact tone, all the more effective for its restraint. "Islamism in Egypt is a social protest that uses religion to express itself," explains Al Aswany, the activist finally emerging from behind the novelist. "Let me give you some numbers. Fifty per cent of Egyptians live below the poverty line. There are two to four million street children. And one-third of the population of Cairo lives without electricity or services."
Religious extremism, he says, has been nurtured by the government. "In Egypt, we have always had a tolerant reading of Islam. But since the 1970s, the Saudis have spent billions of dollars on exporting [the radical tradition of] Wahhabism. And Wahhabism is a Christmas present for the Arab dictators - they both deny political rights to the individual." The west's fear of Islamists (in the shape of the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned organisation whose members are allowed to run for parliament as "independent" candidates) coming to power in a democratic election "has been whipped up by the government in order to secure its own position".
"Let's use a medical analogy," continues Al Aswany. "When you analyse Egypt's problems, you have to separate the disease from its symptoms and complications. Our disease is dictatorship, and the symptoms are poverty, injustice, corruption and fanaticism. If you treat the symptoms as though they were the disease, you will kill the patient. And this is what the west and the government are trying to do. Terrorism is not the disease. These people asking 'What shall we do about terrorism?' are missing the point."
The Yacoubian Building is full of vignettes illustrating the corruption that trickles down from the top layers of Egyptian society. While researching the novel, Al Aswany frequented Cairo's run-down, sleazy bars, which survive only by paying protection money to the police. "The first time I went to one of these bars, it was raided," remembers Al Aswany. "An officer took my identity papers and asked: 'What are you doing here? You're a doctor - if you want a drink, go to the Hyatt.' But after that, I made friends with the district chief of police, who loved literature. So I would sit in the bars, and when they were raided once a week the policemen would say: 'Hello, Doctor!' " Al Aswany grins. "He was in completely the wrong job, he was so miserable - but now he is professor of French literature at Helwan University."
It's an unlikely happy ending, but it fits well with Al Aswany's defiant optimism about his beleaguered country. His new novel Chicago, just published in Arabic, is breaking all the sales records set by its predecessor, and he is at work on a third. "I see the spirit of the country defending itself, and the success of my books is proof of this," he says, smiling. "Democracy is not very far. We are about to have a real change."
Alaa Al Aswany's "The Yacoubian Building" is published by Fourth Estate
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