Sitting in her Zamalek apartment, author Ahdaf Soueif tells us a story.
“An Egyptian theater troupe once came over to England and I attended their performance.
“Afterwards, one of the troupe approached me and said, ‘I owe you for something. So I asked him, ‘What?'”He said, ‘My wife got a copy of ‘In the Eye of the Sun’ and put everything on hold when she started reading it. She sat and read it and read it and read it until she finished it. Then she asked me for a divorce.’
Unanticipated feedback perhaps, particularly in the context of Soueif’s work, which has always sought to find what unites people rather than what sets them apart.
That this search for common denominators forms the leitmotif of Soueif’s work is of course unsurprising, given that she is an Egyptian author who writes in English, lives in the UK and is mother to two half-English, half-Egyptian sons.
Herself on the periphery – or perhaps the frontline – of two cultures and identities, Soueif intertwines both in her fiction. Thus in her 800-page epic “In the Eye of the Sun, we see Asya negotiating her personal battles between Egypt and Europe against a background of the political upheavals that shook the Arab region in the late 1960s.
“Mezzatura, the title of Soueif’s 2004 collection of essays written over the past 20 years, is a reference to the “common ground which she says in the introduction is “the ground where everybody is welcome, the ground we need to defend and to expand.
Soueif was in Cairo to speak about the Palestine Festival of Literature, held in May, and which she put together.
During a talk and slide-show of photographs given in Downtown Cairo’s Rawabet Theater at the end of May, Soueif discussed the importance and meaning of this festival to a people under occupation.
She, together with a group of British and American writers, traveled to Hebron.
In Hebron, occupation soldiers guarding the occupiers live on top of Palestinians heads, on their roofs, which they reach by trampling through these people’s houses. Palestinians are not allowed to enter their homes through their front doors and are generally prevented from living a normal life on their own land while settlers go jogging through Hebron’s streets carrying machine guns.
Can there still be hope for the common ground in all this? Soueif is hopeful.
“I have more hope because so many people are working on the same issues, and the issues that trouble the world all feed into each other anyway.
“So it’s amazing that people are working from the common ground, and see the connections, while at the same time the drive from above from governments is completely opposed to this and is about putting up walls and barriers and gated communities and so on.
Soueif says that her perception of the common ground was shaped by her upbringing in Cairo, in a society where differences distinguished but did not divide.
“Living and growing up here I assumed that the common ground was enormous – and when I went abroad I realized that wasn’t so.
“Here [in Egypt] you assumed that most of the people you met had a place in the common ground. When I went abroad I realized that people didn’t see it that way.
Does she think that it is her job to set the West straight about the common ground, about their perceptions of the Arab world?
“In fiction it’s never my aim to propagandize: I write what I think are authentic characters – and they go against the stereotype, so you get readers saying, ‘I never thought I’d empathise with an Egyptian character whose ambitions are the same as mine etc.’
“A couple of weeks ago somebody said to me that something I had done goes against a stereotype and I said to her, ‘how long is this going to carry on being a stereotype?’ There are so many people working now . so much evidence that stereotypes of Arabs, and in particular Muslim women, are false.
“I hope my fiction and my journalism goes against the stereotypes – but only because I’m interesting in writing the truth, not because I’m interested in writing against Western stereotypes. Soueif writes in English despite speaking and writing Arabic fluently. Why is this?
“Because I can’t write in anything else. My Arabic is good enough for daily purposes . articles, reports, but to write fiction you need a different level of being able to manipulate language. What you’re doing is creating effects.
Soueif s current project is a novel she began in 2001. The novel is set 4,000 years ago in the period of transition that occurred in Egypt after lower and Upper Egypt went to war.
“Four thousand years ago, Egypt was in its Middle Kingdom, which is like its classical period, when they carried out agricultural and irrigation projects and there was a literary renaissance.
“But what happened is that the Old Kingdom collapsed very suddenly, resulting in a war between the north and Upper Egypt, which Upper Egypt won, and which resulted in the Middle Kingdom.
“It seems to me that there was a period – the age of chaos – during the war and that there was a group of people who decided that this wouldn’t be the end of history.
“When the country was reunited they sat down and decided the values on which the country would be based.
“Whereas before people had faith in physical structures such as the Pyramids, they became disillusioned with these structures during the age of chaos precisely because it hadn’t saved them from this chaos.
“In addition, whereas previously only the king was considered to have a soul, in the Middle Kingdom everyone was thought to have a soul – which you can consider a bit like the beginning of democracy.
Soueif sees clear parallels between Egypt’s transition through the age of chaos 4,000 years ago and the turmoil and moral questioning the world is currently going through, which she thinks can only be stopped through “radical change.
Speaking of radical change – or perhaps not – who does she think the next US president will be?”I think it’ll be Barack Obama, and I think he’ll be good for America, but I don’t know if he’ll make a big difference to us except that he’s not a neo-conservative and he’s smart.
And what about the next Egyptian President?
She laughs, “Society has not been permitted to choose potential candidates – it’s a very depressing situation.
“The most you can do is resistance through various means – protest, writing . but in present conditions . for a leader to emerge there has to be organized political systems which can put forward people.
What changes has she seen in Egypt since she left?
“The uglification that has happened with flyovers and buildings without planning permission going up and beautiful villas which get pulled down, and traffic chaos.
What about Egyptian society itself? Soueif says that she is heartened by new cultural centers in Cairo. Are there similarities between the nascent cultural revival currently taking place and the Cultural Revolution she witnessed in Egypt in the 1960s?
“There is a cultural revolution at the moment: there is a lot happening: outlets, El-Sakkia, downtown. But whereas the 1960s was an expression of a spirit of optimism, I think today it’s more about resistance.
