Nurturing Life Writing in Egypt after the Arab Spring: Fiction as “Survival Mechanism”

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Notes

1 Tahia Abdel Nasser, Literary Autobiography and Arab National Struggles. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017, p. 7.

2 Nasser, Literary Autobiography, p. 1.

3 Nasser, Literary Autobiography, p. 3.

4 Rita S. Nezami, “Translator’s Introduction.” By Fire: Writings on the Arab Spring, by Tahar Ben Jelloun, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016, p. xi.

5 Nezami, “Translator’s Introduction,” p. xii.

6 “There was too much injustice in the country, too much inequality and humiliation.” Tahar Ben Jelloun, “By Fire,” p. 55.

7 Jelloun, “By Fire,” p. 71.

8 Deborah Treisman, “This Week in Fiction: Tahar ben Jelloun.” The New Yorker, September 6, 2013. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-week-in-fiction-tahar-ben-jelloun.

9 For instance, Jay McInerney writes, “For a while the idea of ‘invented characters’ and alternate realities seemed trivial and frivolous and suddenly, horribly outdated. For a while. I abandoned the novel I was working on and didn't even think about writing fiction for the next six months.” “The Uses of Invention.” The Guardian. September 17, 2005, para. 7. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/sep/17/fiction.vsnaipaul.

10 Nasser, Literary Autobiography, 130. Nasser speaks specifically of the “Tahir memoir” as a twenty-first-century form of Arabic autobiographic writing, “characterised by simultaneity, association, and introspection.”

11 Ahdaf Soueif, Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed. London: Bloomsbury, 2012, p. xiii.

12 Soueif, Cairo, p. xiii.

13 Soueif, Cairo, pp. 149–150. A slightly changed version of the text presented here was published in Ahdaf Soueif, “Hosni Mubarak Resigns: ‘Look at the Streets… This Is What Hope Looks Like.’” The Guardian, February 11, 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/11/hosni-mubarak-resigns-egypt.

14 Soueif, Cairo, p. xiii.

15 Soueif, Cairo, p. 48.

16 Soueif, Cairo, p. 51.

17 Soueif, Cairo, p. xiv.

18 Soueif, Cairo, pp. xiii–xiv.

19 Nasser, Literary Autobiography, p. 131.

20 Soueif, Cairo, pp. xiv–xv.

21 Soueif, Cairo, pp. 5–6.

22 Committee to Protect Journalists, “2016 Prison Census: 259 Journalists Jailed Worldwide.” CPJ: Committee to Protect Journalists. https://cpj.org/imprisoned/2016.php.

23 Ahmed Naji, Using Life: A Novel, illus. Ayman Al Zorkany, trans. Benjamin Koerber. Austin: University of Texas at Austin, p. 1.

24 Craig Hamilton, “Allegory, Blending, and Censorship in Modern Literature.” Journal of Literary Semantics, vol. 40, 2011, pp. 23–42.

25 Naji, Using Life, p. 117.

26 For a detailed analysis of the trial, see: Alison Gibbons, “Using Life and Abusing Life in the Trial of Ahmed Naji: Text World Theory, Adab, and the Ethics of Reading.” Journal of Language and Discrimination, vol. 3, no. 1, forthcoming.

27 Elena Chiti, “‘A Dark Comedy’: Perceptions of the Egyptian Present between Reality and Fiction.” Living 2016: Cultural Codes and Arrays in Arab Everyday Worlds Five Years after the “Arab Spring,” edited by Stephan Guth and Elena Chiti, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, vol. 16, 2016, pp. 273–289. http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/jais/volume/docs/vol16/v16_09_living2016.pdf279.

28 Chiti, “A Dark Comedy,” p. 281.

29 Naji, “Nurturing Love in Prison.” Ahmed Naji. June 8, 2018. https://ahmednaji.net/en/2018/06/08/n-2/

30 Chiti, “‘A Dark Comedy,’” p. 286.

31 Pepe, “That Future is Now and It Stinks: Critical Dystopia in the Novels Istikhdām al-Ḥayāh (Using Life, 2015) by Aḥmad Nājī and ʿUṭārid (Mercury, 2015) by Muḥammad Rabīʿ,” round table at the American Association of Comparative Literature Annual Meeting (ACLA), Utrecht, July 6–9, 2017. Pepe has also noted the prevalence of dystopic fiction as a means for critiquing contemporary Cairo and Egypt.