From behind the walls of al-Wahat Prison, I and my friends, Kamal al-Qilish, Rauf Mas‘ad, and Abdel Hakim Qasim, enthusiastically followed Soviet poets — the young poets Yevtushenko and Voznesensky, as well as the older Tvardovsky — as they exploded conventional forms. We also followed the experiments in spontaneous writing and Op Art in America, and the nouveau roman craze in France. Cairene magazines were full of news about literary experiments all over the world. The regime’s covert, conservative opposition, which actually controlled publishing and media outlets in the country, cleverly promoted the works of Beckett, Ionesco, and Dürrenmatt.
Rebellion was the fuel and experimentalism was the slogan of the day. Naguib Mahfouz put Balzac aside and helped the Arabic novel leapfrog an entire century. New names rose to prominence: Edward Kharrat, Ghalib Halasa, Bahaa Taher, Sulaiman Fayyad, Ibrahim Aslan, Yahya al-Taher Abdallah, and others. I thought I’d found my own path when I discovered Hemingway, by way of two books that managed to breach the walls of al-Wahat. The first was by Carlos Baker and the second was a collection of essays — there was an especially good one by an older Soviet critic whose name I’ve forgotten — analyzing the great American writer’s techniques. I put my faith in these techniques right away (I still do, in certain respects), the most important of which were economy and restraint. Set against the conventionally flabby eloquence of Arabic literature, this “iceberg” style acquired a special sheen. It was under the influence of Hemingway that I began working on my still unfinished novel of childhood.
In the furnished room I rented after my release in the neighborhood of Heliopolis, I would leaf distractedly through the drafts of that novel, asking myself what the point was of writing something that didn’t engage the struggle against imperialism, the effort to build socialism, and all the difficulties these efforts brought in their train: terror, torture, prison, death, personal misery.
Then one night I won’t forget I glanced over the diary, composed in a telegraphic style, which I wrote in every night after the policeman’s departure. There were only a few entries, about sixteen days as I remember. I read the whole thing, then shivered with excitement. There was a buried current running through that telegraphic style, a style that never stopped for self-examination, didn’t bother to search for le mot juste, nor to make sure that the language was neat and tidy, nor that all ugliness such as might shock delicate sensibilities had been scrubbed away. There was beauty in such feeble sentences as: “The writer said that Maupassant said that the artist must create a world that is more beautiful and more simple than our own.” And there was a beauty in ugly actions, like passing gas in a bourgeois living room.
Wasn’t a bit of ugliness necessary to expose an equivalent ugliness in “physiological” acts like beating an unarmed man to death, or shoving a tire pump up his anus, or electric cords into his penis? All because he held a contrary opinion, or defended his freedom and sense of nationalism? Why is it stipulated that we write only about flowers and perfume when shit fills the streets, when sewage water covers the earth and everyone smells it? Or that we only write about creatures seemingly without genitals, so that we don’t violate the supposed decency of readers who actually know more about sex than we do?
Reading my brief diaries, I felt that here was the raw material for a work of art. It only needed some arranging and polishing. I felt that I’d finally found my own voice.
I found work at a bookshop selling foreign books (Rauf Mas‘ad and Abdel Hakim Qasim later graduated from the same institution). My job required that I man the store all day, so days off were the only time I had for serious writing. I still remember the morning in Ezbekieh Gardens when I wrote the first page of That Smell. But I quickly saw that I couldn’t go on in this way. I quit work and a friend of mine, Dr. Jamal Saber Gabra, provided me with an unused, book-filled apartment of his in Heliopolis. Surrounded by the writings of archaeologist Sami Gabra (and the tomes of the sainted martyrs), and drawing moral support from my old friends Rauf Mas‘ad and Kamal al-Qilish, I worked diligently on my first novel for three months.
I decided to keep the short-winded style that characterized my diaries, though I carefully rearranged their contents, and I used endnotes to clarify a few things. I called the manuscript “The Rotten Smell in My Nose.”
Yusuf Idriss, whom I had known since the mid-fifties, opposed the idea of endnotes. He thought they were a bit too innovative and convinced me to move them into the main text. He also argued against the title I’d chosen. In the psychiatric clinic he’d just opened in Midan Giza we came up with “That Smell.” He was also kind enough to write an introduction.
Finally, I handed the novel over to a printer, paying him twenty guineas to publish it. The illustrator Mustafa Hussein gave me the design for the cover and Yusuf Idriss’s introduction opened the book. There was also a short text on the cover, a kind of manifesto, signed by Kamal al-Qilish, Rauf Mas‘ad, and Abdel Hakim Qasim:
If you do not like the novel now between your hands, the fault isn’t ours. It is instead the fault of our cultural moment, dominated as it has been for many years by works of shallowness, naïveté, and conventionalism. To shatter this climate of artistic stagnation, we must turn to the kind of sincere and sometimes agonized writing you find here.
It is in such straits that we introduce this novel by the young writer Sonallah Ibrahim. It will be followed by Nabil Badran’s play, “The Blacks,” short stories by Kamal al-Qilish, Ahmad Hashem al-Sharif, and Abdel Hakim Qasim, plays by Rauf Mas‘ad, and poems by Muhammad Hammam.
These unfamiliar names will introduce an equally unfamiliar art. An art that expresses the spirit of the age and the experience of a generation. An age in which distances and boundaries have vanished, brilliant horizons have opened while dangers threaten, illusions have crumbled and man has penetrated into the truth of existence. A generation born in the shadow of monarchy and feudalism, that went out marching to demand the fall of the King and the British, and that embraced the July Revolution with words and deeds. A generation that has witnessed the collapse of monarchy and capitalism and the construction of socialism — all this in a few short years. A rich and profound experience, full of contradictions and crises, a growing sense of self and knowledge of self. All this requires serious, courageous expression to articulate these experiences creatively and innovatively.
Such is the road we have chosen.
No doubt the reader of today will smile along with me at the tone of absolute self-confidence (reflecting, perhaps, an absolute lack of self-confidence), at those grand phrases, “the truth of existence,” and overhasty pronouncements, “the construction of socialism.” Such is the naïveté of beginnings, which may also be a form of special pleading.
The days following my novel’s publication were hard. At that time, Egyptian newspapers and magazines published nothing but the tired certainties of socialist realism, never neglecting to mention the global play of forces, the technological achievements, etc. (Today these dogmas are parroted by the most backward, reactionary writers, an illustration of their worth and usefulness as ideas.) The Arab nation, with Egypt in the vanguard, was indeed in a dogfight with American imperialism and its Zionist stepdaughter, not to mention Arab conservatives. So it was natural for me to wonder whether I wasn’t harming the country by publishing my work under such conditions. Meanwhile, the threat of imprisonment hung over my head.