CULTURE: Spotlight on Egyptian Literature > BOOK Southern Africa

Spotlight on Egyptian Literature: Ancient Tales Tell of Modern Woes, Naguib Mahfouz and the Literary Police

by Chiara on Feb 4th, 2011

With Egypt in the middle of a political revolution and Tahrir square alight with anti-government activity, attention has turned to Egyptian literature as a means of understanding the country’s cultural and political ideology, as tracked through a literary consciousness. This Friday, we bend our heads to the books and share with you an ancient Egyptian story with modern parallels, as well as a review of how the police and state have featured in Egyptian literature. We finish off with an analysis of Nobel prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz’s influence on the Egyptian novel:

The Tale of SinuheMartin Marks from the Huffington Post re-examines some old hieroglyphic excerpts from his undergraduate years and finds a message pertinent to Egypt’s current situation. A line from “The Eloquent Peasant” had a particular resonance for Marks, reading “Behold! I shall take your donkey, peasant, on account of its eating my Upper Egyptian barley”. The line is spoken by a government official, about to unfairly seize the possessions of a lowly labourer:

Several days ago, as the Twittersphere burgeoned with news of the situation in Egypt, an apocryphal piece of trivia from my undergraduate years — that I had double majored in Near Eastern Studies with a focus on Egyptology — came into play. For those expecting any tweets pertinent to these events, the protests come about 3,500 years too late, as my area of expertise pretty much ended with the reign of Ramses XI. Still, I tweeted my insight by way of a hieroglyphic excerpt from the “The Shipwrecked Sailor,” an Egyptian tale of a mariner lost at sea.

“Whether they see the heavens or whether they see the land, their hearts are as brave as lions,” the line reads. In college, it was one of my favorites, mostly because it demonstrated a non-geminating prospective verb being used to convey conditional mood, followed shortly thereafter by a clause containing an r of comparison (I spent a lot of time in libraries as an undergraduate). Later that night, however, I remembered another line, not quite as grammatically robust, but worth revisiting because it seemed to better fit the occasion: Mk wi r nḥm ‘3.k sḫty ḥr wnm.f šm’.i. Translating from the Middle Egyptian, it reads: Behold! I shall take your donkey, peasant, on account of its eating my Upper Egyptian barley.

Police and power have always played a significant role in Egyptian literature, writes Amany Aly Shawky – with police officers featuring as the antagonists and protagonists in many Egyptian masterpieces. Shawky reviews former Brigadier General Mahmoud Qatri’s two books E’terafat Dabet Shorta fe Mamlaket al-Ze’ab (The Confessions of a Police officer in the Kingdom of Wolves) and Tazweer Dawla (The Forgery of a Country). Both stories are about corruption in the police force.

Literature has always been fascinated with politics, power and the police, and Egyptian literature is no exception. Police officers have been the antagonists and the protagonists of many masterpieces in the country. Many fiction and nonfiction pieces aimed to look behind the scenes of the life of policemen, whose world is so often a tightly held secret. Sometimes, though, the police will open up themselves.

Mahmoud Qatri is a former Brigadier General and the author of two books about corruption in the Egyptian police force: “E’terafat Dabet Shorta fe Mamlaket al-Ze’ab” (The Confessions of a Police officer in the Kingdom of Wolves) and “Tazweer Dawla” (The Forgery of a Country). The books reveal the daunting reality of a world usually kept hidden from the average citizen, depicting torture, fraudulent elections, blackmail and forged reports.

In “Tazweer Dawla,” he writes that police officers are trained to blindly obey unlawful orders; during big referendums, the government and the ministry distribute police officers at all polling stations to amend the results to the accepted 99.9 percent.

Midaq AlleyMany literary analysts are also revisiting the works of Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, “The Pharoah of Literature”. So prolific and original was Mahfouz’s work, that many feel he hindered the development of the Arabic novel, making it impossible for new authors to “break new ground”. Jordanian writer Elias Farkouh says that it was only at the end of the 1960s that young writers began to “rebel against Mahfouz, in literary terms”:

Naguib Mahfouz, who went on to immortalize his hometown in numerous great works of literature and to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in Cairo on 11 December 1911. This year, the Egyptian capital is commemorating the centenary of Mahfouz’s birth with a celebration of the writer and his literary legacy.

2011 has been declared Mahfouz Year. The programme of festivities was launched in Cairo in mid-December 2010 with an event that posed the following question: how is it possible to write novels in the shadow of such a literary giant? With all his literary achievements, is Mahfouz perhaps an obstacle for the development of the Arabic novel?

This question was first asked by the Egyptian critic Ragaa’ al-Naqqash at the end of the 1960s. At the time, the author of the Cairo Trilogy was so influential that the concern seemed perfectly justified.

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