English novelist and cultural historian Marina Warner says she has been dealt a “rather weird hand in terms of personal circumstances, a fact that she has put to good use in her writing over the years.
Born to an ex-colonel of the British Army and an Italian mother raised under Fascism, Warner herself was shuffled from country to country as a child.
She also had the good luck to be granddaughter to national cricketing hero Tom Warner, himself of white West Indian background.
Both her mother’s wartime Italian roots and her grandfather’s origins among the white planters of the Caribbean have made their way into Warner’s past works of fiction.
Her next novel, which is still very much under construction, will focus on her early childhood years in Cairo, the city she called home until the age of six.
As with previous works of fiction, this new book – tentatively titled “Inventory of a Life Mislaid – will combine historical background with personal details, factual research with imagined lives.
Born in London in 1946, Warner was transported to Cairo as a baby. Her father had fought with British Eighth Army during the war, and had met her mother while fighting through Italy. After being de-mobbed, he decided that post-war Britain was no place to raise a family, and instead settled on Cairo, where he opened a stationary shop, the city’s first and only branch of the British chain W.H. Smith.
It was a hopeful venture, but one that was doomed to failure, overtaken by tumultuous political events. The shop was destroyed in the fires of January 26, 1952, and the family re-located once more, this time to Belgium.
“I remember quite a lot, even though I was only six when we left, Warner told Daily News Egypt this week at the ongoing Cairo International Book Fair. “It was fired very late on the day of Black Saturday.
The first buildings that were attacked were the big British hang-outs. You know, the Turf Club, Shepherds Hotel, the Rolls Royce showroom, Barclays Bank, the British Council. They were flagships. The shop was the last building to be fired, at 4:30 in the afternoon, and it was unlucky actually.
The events of Black Saturday are still surrounded by a degree of historical controversy. Opinion varies as to the cause of the fires, which precipitated not only the exodus of a great many foreigners but also the end of the monarchy and British control over Egypt. The Free Officers were of course prominent in events of the time, as were such groups as the Muslim Brotherhood and the quasi-fascist Young Egypt organization. Warner’s father, however, felt that hidden foreign influences were at work. The Soviets, he said, were ultimately behind the fires, which he believed to have been coordinated through the Polish Embassy.
“The king and the police did nothing; they sort of hung back, says Warner.
“There had been an enormous number of colonial abuses, it must be said. I mean, there had been a lot of very insensitive and very blind decisions, political decisions by the British. I mean, they were still living in a kind of imperial dream. They didn’t really see what was happening, I think.
Warner paints a colorful picture of her early days in Egypt, a charmed life of royal ease. She recalls being taken to the Gezira Club by her nanny, and describes her father variously as “bookish and “Blimpish. Her Italian mother put much of her energy into adopting the culture of her newly-acquired husband, eventually becoming “a thesaurus of Britishness.
Warner’s background is mixed, and yet she bears many of the hallmarks of the British upper-class archetype. Educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, she is softly spoken, yet enthusiastic. Her public school accent might not be out of place at a fashionable dinner party in colonial Delhi, Hong Kong or indeed Cairo.
Perhaps most telling, though, is her tendency towards apology, most notably on the subject of her own colonial past. On the charge of Orientalism, Warner freely admits guilt, claiming a particularly liking for “exotic settings.
And yet, a worse crime by far, she says, would be to shy away from writing about foreign cultures or settings; to do so would be to miss the chance to re-evaluate history.
“I want to confront British colonial history, she says. “I want to see if I can dramatize it in ways that will speak to our time, so that we can see what was happening, what the relations of the past to the present still are.
“I believe that one should take issue with one’s history, and one should engage with it. I’m not someone who absolves it, but I want to engage with it, I want to explore it.
