Saad Elkhadem
An Egyptian Satire about a Condemned Building
English and Arabic
Toronto, ON: York Press, 1996. Pp. 62+. $9.95
Reviewed by Nieves Paradela

The literature of the Egyptian writer Saad Elkhadem, who since the sixties has lived outside Egypt, has two main thematic lines. One is about the life of the Arab people, men or women, exiled in Europe or in North America; the other is about the life of the Egyptian people inside their own country. This is not surprising, since Elkhadem’s literature has always dealt with exile, be it exterior or interior. Effectively, we can observe that the characters of his literary works centered on Egypt are on the verge of leaving Egypt, because they have decided to escape willingly, or because they are forced to depart. The reasons for that decision, be it willing or unwilling, has been explained in many of Elkhadem’s novels such as The Plague (1989), The Blessed Movement (1997), and now in A Condemned Building.

This new micro-novel (as Elkhadem likes to define this particular literary genre, in which his mastery as a writer shines through) has a very similar scheme to The Plague, although its hard sociopolitical criticism is not addressed only to Nasser’s dictatorship but to all the repressive regimes that have followed one after another since the beginning of this century and which have left a legacy of backwardness, poverty, and corruption. As the writer says in the first pages of the novel: “Whether it was a foolish and impudent monarchy, or an obscene military rule, you’ll find that corruption was always the common denominator. You’ll undoubtedly also find that the last fifty years of this nation’s history were the most significant and crucial of all epochs, and that Nasser’s despotic reign was the most obscene and immoral of all systems” (3).

Elkhadem represents Egyptian society as a building inhabited by a group of men and women. All the inhabitants end up leaving the building toward the end of the novel, not by personal choice but because the landlord has decided to demolish it to build condos which he hopes to sell to wealthy foreigners from the oil-rich Arab countries or America. The reading of A Condemned Building permits us to enter into each apartment of the building (in a narrative structure that reminds us of George Perec’s novel La vie, mode d’emploi) and to attend the dialogues and monologues of its inhabitants. Thus we meet a literary critic and a publisher who are discussing literature and money; a widow who returns to Egypt in order to bury her unfaithful and hated husband, and whose only real concern is going back to America; a university professor in his fifties who, without any hopes or aspirations, is still eager for money and who is speaking with a young university lecturer; another widow who is forced to live with her unmarried sister-in-law. There is also a Coptic family, a middle-aged couple and a younger one (the women in Elkhadem’s literature are always stronger and more intelligent than the men); a group of adolescents without any desire to study; an exmilitary of Nasser’s times; and finally the landlord of the building.

Elkhadem paints with superb irony a very pessimistic panorama of his native country: people managing their lives for economic interests, people humbled by their religion or their sex, young people with no future ...and all of them suffering from a lack of political or personal liberty. This radical criticism is also expressed through language. Once again, we see Elkhadem’s mastery in the literary use of the Egyptian spoken dialect. His decision to write in the spoken register of the Arabic language has always been seen with suspicion by traditionalist sectors of the Egyptian cultural and political system. In doing this, the author opposes “those fossilized sheikhs who fear running water and abhor flowing air; ...those single-minded critics who don’t welcome what’s new, or tolerate what’s original” (2).

The ready access to the text in both the original Arabic and in English translation (made by Elkhadem himself) adds to the value of the book and the pleasure of the bilingual reader. Unfortunately, this innovative literature remains nearly unknown to Arab people inside Arabic-speaking countries.