Many readers took the novel as a butt for jokes and sarcasm. Others exploited it for their own purposes. Abdel Qader Hatem took it to president Gamal Abdel Nasser as proof of the Communists’ vulgarity and degeneracy. The Islamic Conference came to the same conclusion. It pained me that my “caper” was used to cast doubt on a movement whose struggles and sacrifices I have honored for many decades. I experienced the same feelings when compelled to publish the novel in 1968 in Shi‘r, a Beiruti magazine run by Yusuf al-Khal and edited by al-Nahar newspaper — neither of which were themselves above suspicion.
But I never regretted writing the novel or publishing it under such circumstances. Nor did I regret the style I wrote it in or ever consider renouncing it. True, I’m often troubled by the sense that I aborted a much greater work. But I’m convinced that such were the limits of my abilities at that time.
Self-criticism, an attention to the interior voice, recognition of the real, an impatience with bourgeois sensitivities and fads — all these continue to be at the basis of my work.
Confiscation didn’t put an end to the book for it was already out in the world (a lesson the state apparatuses of Arab countries might learn from). In 1969, while I was abroad, a publishing house called New Culture, once called July Editorial, came out with a second edition of the novel, having removed without my permission everything they imagined might offend the censor. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the publisher had in fact used a peculiar sort of censor, characteristic of that time, which was the “private editor” — a freelancer who offered his services to authors and publishing houses alike. After an agreement between New Culture and Contemporary Writings, the same edition of the novel was republished in Cairo in 1971.
The current edition is the first complete edition to be published since the initial, confiscated version: the version published by Shi‘r was not spared the usual scissors, cutting out everything offensive to readers of delicate sensibilities. I have of course corrected the original’s errors of syntax and grammar, as well as those of negligence (calling a child “he” in one place and “she” in another, for example). I’ve also corrected the epigraph by James Joyce. In the original edition I claimed it was taken from Ulysses (I’d come across the phrase in the TLS, which appears to have misattributed it). When my novel was translated into English by Heinemann in 1971, the translator Denys Johnson-Davies searched that novel long and hard without success. Joyce experts eventually located its source in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
SONALLAH IBRAHIM
CAIRO, 1986
* See Fi-l-Thaqafa al-Misriyya [On Egyptian Culture] (Cairo: Dar al-Fikr al-Jadid, 1955).
NOTES FROM PRISON
All footnotes in this translation are the author’s, from Yawmiyyat al-Wahat (2004).
1962 April
Cairo commits suicide. The fire of ’52. The city that rose up and fell destructively on itself. Story of freedom in the streets, among the people. The great, enormous city from every angle, its birthing pains.
The hero and the masses — Plekhanov — the cult of personality.
Torture: and since that time he feels that wherever he walks, whether he’s coming in or going out, something will hit him, something will shock him. If someone surprises him, his muscles tense. He expects to be slapped or kicked.
June
The thing I seem furthest from, though I think about it all the time and hope to achieve it, is to deal with man from within. So many sentiments, so many strange and knotted interior operations.
Colors and their meanings. Red is love. Yellow jealousy. Blue sadness. Green loyalty. White purity. Purple yearning.
The writer’s path is full of sacrifices; everything must submit to his art. Pushkin wasted five years of his life chasing after his girlfriend while she toyed with him. The writer must not allow anything to get in the way of his work or his art. He is a saint and a martyr.
Here is the artist’s role in Egypt today. Not to write something enjoyable merely for its aesthetic value. Not simply to lose oneself in philosophical and intellectual issues. Not to live captive to one’s individual experience, which could lead to loneliness or to feelings of alienation and absurdity. Not to be content with recording — impressionistically, neutrally, superficially — what happens in society. Instead, the Egyptian artist must work actively and with others. He must dive into the depths of the people and the depths of the individual. He must reveal the way forward, he must choose the direction and change the direction. He must lead and play a role in everyday life, armed with his technique, personal experience, self-awareness, persistence, and the readiness to sacrifice.
The writer is responsible for every word he writes.
“When people talk, listen. Most people don’t listen.” Advice given by Ernest Hemingway in a letter to a young writer.
“The Beacons,” at the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union:
— Alexander Tvardovsky: “The hero of my tale, whom I love with all my heart, whom I have tried to depict in all his beauty, who was, is, and will be beautiful, is the truth.” Tolstoy.
— “Those writers who hurry to respond to the demands of the day, who apprise us of contemporary events, deserve the sobriquet ‘skimmers.’ For them, the building of the Volga Canal doesn’t merit more than two or three on-the-spot articles, dashed-off and superficial. A mirroring of events and nothing else. But the same subject cost Vladimir Fomenko ten years of hard work. I cannot hide my fear each time I see writers hurrying to spread the news before the events and facts have matured in their minds, before they have experienced a deep need to communicate with the reader.”
— Sholokhov: “A writer who speaks of collective farms should know no less than a local agronomist.”
— I am a Communist first, a writer after that.
November
“The true material of film is the monologue,” Eisenstein.
No real interest in people. Each looks out for himself. Egotism. Where is the spirit of sacrifice, of consciousness-raising?
Psychological problems. Theft. The nature of conditions. Persistent belief in the impossibility of a long-term sentence.
December
The mouth, like the prison, contains, when closed, living things.
A story in two sections: in the first, people enter and do what they do and their actions appear strange, spontaneous, random, futile — in the second section, the same people behaving reasonably, or acting out an interpretation of their previous behavior, or of the laws that governed all those actions that had seemed random, futile, or accidental.