Saad Elkhadem
The Blessed Movement: An Egyptian Micronovel
English and Arabic
Toronto: York Press, 1997. Pp. 24. $9.95
Reviewed by Issa Peters
Like his previous fictional work, such as The Plague, the novella under review is another example of Saad Elkhadem’s innovative fiction that dwells not only on the brutalities of the Nasser regime following the Egyptian revolution of 1952, but also on the cooperation of the Egyptian bureaucracy in executing Nasser’s orders without question, exonerating themselves on the basis that they are carrying out orders from above. Elkhadem utilizes two innovative techniques, hitherto rarely used by Egyptian writers. The author’s first technique is to parade before the reader a galaxy of characters who represent a cross section of Egyptian society that has suffered at the hands of Nasser and his cohorts in a police state, devoting a paragraph to each of the characters in the first section of the novel.
There are the servant ‘Abd al-Mu’ti and his master Ahmad Pasha Rushdie; the wealthy Greco-Egyptian Madame Sonya; the government employee Zayid Bey, who was involved in implementing the new measures announced by the Revolutionary Council of the “Blessed Movement”; the impoverished hawker Umm Hamdi; the military man ‘Abd al-‘Al; and the Egyptian expatriate returning to his homeland and trying, though fruitlessly, to invest in the Egyptian economy. The portrayal of such characters is achieved by the author through the third-person, omniscient point of view.
The second technique, which is utilized in the second part of the novel, is the alternation between the stream of consciousness and the reporting of an actual speech that the protagonist gives at a conference held to deal with the life and works of a deceased writer. The speech, which is appropriately written in Modern Standard Arabic, is interspersed with the technique of association of ideas that occur to the speaker. This technique sheds light on the discrepancy between what is said in public about political life in Egypt at that time and what is truly thought in private. Thoughts, for instance, of the deceased writer’s arrest by the secret police at dawn, the illegal search of his home, the confiscation of his books, the threats leveled at him, and the death he meets in jail are all presented through this mechanism.
Appropriate in this regard is the employment of the Egyptian colloquial dialect to represent the thoughts that occur to the speaker as he delivers his speech, and also to place them in brackets in the text so they may be set apart from the actual speech itself. Furthermore, such private thoughts are put in brackets because of extreme public distaste for them. Thus, the author demonstrates creatively how stifling political life in Egypt was during the Nasser regime, creating almost a split personality socially and culturally as well as psychologically among the Egyptian individuals living both inside and outside Egypt.
The last part of The Blessed Movement: An Egyptian Micronovel is a confessional first-person narrative seen from the viewpoints of a victim of a midnight raid whose husband was arrested and later died in jail, a colonel in the security forces, a police general, a master sergeant, and a director general of the department of prisons. Except for the first, a poor lone Egyptian woman, all the preceding characters justify their brutal deeds on the basis that they were doing their jobs and carrying out what they were ordered to do.
Generally, the translation succeeds in recreating the spirit of the original while maintaining a precise and clearly understandable rendition. Admirable is the translation, for instance, of a difficult Egyptian proverb into the following words: “Beat me harder and harder, because I am the one who gave you this power over me” (16). Rarely does the translation of this overall fine piece of literary art become literal as in “She went from success to success” (11), “Those people have ? plenty of words” (11) instead of “Talk too much,” and “I and all who worked with me” (21) instead of “Those who worked with me and I.”
There are also a few typographical errors, misspellings in the Arabic and English texts, a few grammatical errors in the Arabic text, and a couple of Arabic words that were not translated into English. (In the English text, the only typographical error I could find is “though” (17) for “thought.” The ones in the Arabic text are “ibnt” (5), “ta’liim” (9), “ili” (19), “bisihhih” (19), “thaanih” (19), and “ta’inuh” (20), which should read “ibnah,” “ta’allum,” “ila,” “bisihhah,” “thaaniyah,” and “ta’yinuh.” In addition, the word “’ala” (21) is repeated twice and the chairs for the hamza in “as’ila” (17), “masaa’an” (17), “bilaqa’ihi” (18), and “istihzaa’an” (21) are also incorrect.
But setting such things aside, The Blessed Movement: An Egyptian Micronovel is a very well done, competent translation of a powerful literary work of art that pioneers innovative techniques in the field of the modern Egyptian novella.