Saad Elkhadem
One Night in Cairo (Bilingual Edition)
Toronto: York Press, 2001. Pp. 78. $15.95
Reviewed by A.F. Cassis
To paraphrase Somerset Maugham, we get to know a writer not by one book but by a body of work. In One Night in Cairo, Saad Elkhadem returns to the central and favorite topic of earlier works: the displaced Egyptian or those “lost souls” to whom Europe is “the common denominator,” as they try to come to terms with their exile or isolation. This time it is not the Flying Egyptian crash landing in Canada or adrift in Europe; it is the story of an Egyptian who returns to his native land after the experience of Europe and attempts to defeat the feeling of isolation that overwhelms him “in a country that has become alien” (11) to him. In this novel, Elkhadem keeps his observations on the background of Egypt and its “erratic political history” (2) to a minimum, except for when the narrative “I” muses upon his editor-in-chief and his allegiance to authority (30).
The hallmark of the Elkhadem protagonist, with whom one has come to empathize, is unmistakable from the opening page: a first-person, unnamed narrator/protagonist journalist/writer. He is thinking aloud, searching for a topic for his weekly column, and musing about a befitting style and a proper novelistic “frame” for his work. He is at once the “artist-hero” and the artist as his own subject.
The narrative “I” is well educated and well versed too in the politics of the not-too-distant history of Egypt from the forties onwards. A novelist—Elkhadem and his unnamed protagonist/narrator are no exceptions—finds in his life—the “neglected reminiscences” (1) of the narrative “I”—material for dramatization that he uses in fiction. It is this quality of honest experience in the protagonist’s narrative—from his first sexual encounter to the rage and turmoil resulting from his experience with Karen in Europe, to his present and immediate agonies of frustration and error—that gives his style a remarkable vividness and lifts the narrative from the level of a mere sequence of facts that characterize the “Footnotes.” Events in One Night in Cairo do not simply follow a chronological sequence but are the result of the free association of “neglected reminiscences.” The narrative “I” is an acute and unromantic observer who describes incidents as he sees them from the outside. As a reliable narrator, he never sacrifices the truth and, as a writer, he faces the challenge of a new method of expression. One cannot fail to notice the contrast between the straightforward narrative of incidents in the five “Footnotes” and the tortured musings of the narrative “I” throughout.
Since Henry James, no writer worthy of consideration can afford to ignore “point of view.” The aspiring novelist in the narrative “I” is forever conscious of point of view as well as the potential of the novel to be “the literary genre closest to the masses” (8). In what could easily become part of a course on the fundamentals of novel writing to undergraduates, the narrative “I” muses on the “trade” of novel writing: from the search of a suitable style to reflect experimentation, especially with the flow of the stream of consciousness, to the choice of the third-person point of view to tell the story of Karen and Adli, to the conscious shift in point of view, to the narrative task of dialogue and the need for a “story.” He also questions the dilemma of the creative writer: Should the novelist be tied to a particular ideal? Committed to a specific conception? Or should he “leap and frolic in a vast field” (17) without any allegiance to a world view? He is also aware that by choosing the second alternative, he is in danger of turning the writer into “a skillful goldsmith or a dexterous weaver” (17); hence, his musings on language, on the use of Classical Arabic versus the colloquial Cairene dialect to project a true picture of a situation from both the inside and the outside. But he never exceeds the bounds of realism; that “not everything that takes place is worthy of narrating” (9) reveals a welcome consciousness of the pitfalls of Naturalism.
Saad Elkhadem writes as a realist and does not yield to the pious moralizing, gushing sentimentality, and melodrama that often afflict writers depicting a “tormented heart” or a “soul on fire” (20). The fictional form Elkhadem constructs in One Night in Cairo attracts and focuses the reader’s imagination on the narrator and his plight. He has succeeded in presenting us with a work that delightfully and sensitively describes the creative process at work and the problems the novelist faces.
Elkhadem’s systematic publication of bilingual editions of his works from the 1980s was instrumental in opening up part of the literary scene in Egypt and a different realm of thought and experience to the Western mind. As an academic, too, he seems to be also well aware of the pitfalls and complex problems of the art of translation. Pope’s words “True ease in writing comes from art, not chance” are especially applicable to Elkhadem’s translation. It reads smoothly, very much like an original composition, except for the odd time when we get an unusual expression or a “bookish” metaphor.