Al-Ahram Weekly   Al-Ahram Weekly
27 July - 2 August 2000
Issue No. 492
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The francophone predicament

By Youssef Rakha

The cultural lethargy of the past months has not subsided, and so it must be stated again: the nation's intellectual engines are energy-deprived. In the last few weeks, at least, the repercussions of the Seaweed controversy, Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon, the second Camp David summit and the ongoing trial of Saadeddin Ibrahim (topics that are outdated or non-cultural) have occupied acres of column inches. And then there are summer festivals (the Jarash Festival in Jordan, the Rabat Festival in Morocco, the Baalbek Festival in Lebanon). And commemorations: Syrian painter Fateh Madras' first death anniversary -- 27 June; the renowned Egyptian composer Mohamed El-Mougi's fifth death anniversary -- 1 July. But notwithstanding these -- and similar -- occurrences, if culture is happening at all, it is happening somewhere else.

Why but for such lethargy would Akhbar Al-Adab (the 16 and 23 July issues, respectively) devote expansive sections to "Hassan Soliman's women" and the cultural legacy of 1952 (the latter to coincide with the 48th anniversary of the Revolution)? The ageing painter's concern with the second sex is hardly a topic for intellectual debate, while the newspaper's "special file," offering partisan, if not conspiricist, readings of the Revolution, fails to serve the reader an adequate blend of culture and politics. It remains unclear, for example, how long-drawn-out conundrums like "the democracy of a just despot," or "how we were naïve in understanding Nasser," are relevant to present-day Arab culture. Instead, Akhbar Al-Adab administers the weekly dose of 1960s-nationalist-leftism, a drug that continues to be used in excess despite repeated evidence of inefficacy.

Regarding Ibrahim's trial and the current controversy surrounding the Ibn Khaldoun Centre, where Al-Qahira was informative and objective, Akhbar Al-Adab jumped straight from "collaboration with the West" -- an activity nobody censures in principle -- to treason and espionage, re-employing a tried and tired "intellectual" tactic. But other than this kind of engagement, the Cairo intelligentsia has offered little. More or less the same could be said of a newly resurrected Beirut, a Bashar-besotted Damascus and an Amman embroiled in extremist witch hunts. None of these cities has recently been a true cultural capital. So is Arab cultural life hibernating, or has it moved elsewhere?

In Paris, for one place, five consecutive editions of Ahmed Abodehman's autobiographical novel La Ceinture (written originally in French and published by Gallimard) were sold out in less than five months. The Saudi writer's astounding success suggests one of two things: either Arab writers and artists are digging cubbyholes in the West (ironically at a time when Egyptian intellectuals have renounced the indispensable Western connection -- "They lived there and they assured us: The West Is A Superstition," one Akhbar Al-Adab headline read); or the literary tradition of Al-Mahjar (literally, the place to which one emigrates) has taken on a post-modern, cosmopolitan and multilingual guise.

In either case, Abodehman's real feat is that he communicates a positive (fictional) view of his native Saudi Arabia, raising his simple "village" to the status of a utopia where "everyone is instinctively a poet" and "no activity is undertaken without singing." Abodehman stands out, the interviewer noted, in that Arabic literature in French has a tendency to "flatter the West, to always praise it and discommend Arab societies." Despite being, in many ways, the Arab world's diametrical opposite of Akhbar Al-Adab's editor, novelist Gamal El-Ghitani, Abodehman too denounces "Western civilisation, the hellishness of consumerist societies... I came to Paris from a world that has managed to preserve its virginity, the transparency of the first human being," he declared to Al-Wasat (10 July). "And my French readers, here they are now, dreaming about emigrating to my village."

Abodehman's most striking difference from El-Ghitani, and Arab writers at large, is that he is not politicised. That he lives in Paris, that he has chosen to write in French (forgoing a potential Arab readership), and that no real country is as beautiful as all that -- none of these facts seemed to concern Abodehman. Neither did the suggestion, barely made in the interview, that his novel is being read in France as an escapist/Orientalist fantasy or a New Age self-help manual -- it has reference to neither Arabs nor reality.

The emphasis Abodehman places on the "value of the individual" contradicts his utopian vision of tribal Bedouin life, but his affirmative comments about the West suggest an awareness of its essential virtues: "France remains, whatever our reservations about it, a safe place for a creative person and a writer." The same sentiment was expressed -- in less contradictory, perhaps more offensive terms -- by Syrian musician Abed Azrié, who has lived in France for the last 33 years. In an interview celebrating his latest CD release, Omar Khayyam (Al-Wasat 17 July), Azrié discussed his "inability to work in the Arab countries, in which the way people live is still conditioned by halal and haram. Here," he asserted, "I can produce contemporary art, I can work in freedom, and there is 'motion' around what I produce: journalism, concerts, programmes... Nobody tells me to write a song for a specific political occasion." As neutral about his country of origin as Abodehman is positive, Azrié sounds too removed from the Mahjar (or any other) tradition to be historically relevant to Arab culture -- which is not to say he doesn't have a point.

However important these questions, though -- and whatever the significance of Arab cultural life in France -- credit must go to Edward Said for providing cultural commentators with something to talk about. The banished Palestinian, in the wake of the publication of his memoirs, pelted the Israeli forces beyond the barbed-wire fence demarcating Lebanon's newly liberated borders with a few symbolic stones. So, while Said rails against Camp David II, while Tunisian scholar Hisham Jo'ait declares "Nasser an opportunist, [Egyptian literary pioneer] Taha Hussein weak, [Moroccan philosopher] Mohamed Arkoun someone who writes to order, and the Arabs stupid people" (Al-Qahira, 18 July), the popular colloquial Arabic poet and lyricist Abdel-Rahman El-Abnoudi (a man who has epitomised the Upper Egyptian sensibility in public consciousness) accepts the position of cultural programme director of the first private-sector Egyptian television channel, Al-Mihwar. It would be no surprise, at any rate, if the next stop on El-Abnoudi's itinerary is Paris.

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