House as novel, novel as house: The global, the intimate, and the terrifying in contemporary Egyptian literature

Abstract

Contemporary Arabic fiction traces displacement and the importance of place within experience of war and tyranny, migrations and forced dislocation, economic hardship and political disillusionment. Three Egyptian novels from the cusp of the 21st century construct houses as structures of displacement, anxiety and crowding. Hopes engendered by Egypt’s 1952 revolution, progressively dismantled, inhabit structures that mark out precarious existences for Egyptian youth.

Keywords:

• Egypt
• Arabic novel
• Nasser
• house
• spatiality

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Ericka Beckman, Wail Hassan, Brett Kaplan, and Rini Bhattacharya Mehta for their suggestions. Versions of this essay were delivered at the University of Chicago and Abu Dhabi Cultural Authority (2008); as the George Antonius Lecture, St Antony’s College, Oxford (2009); and in the symposium “Egyptian Literary Culture and Egyptian Modernity”, Cairo University (2010). One section is drawn from the afterword to Abu Golayyel’s Thieves in Retirement (2006).

Notes

1. After first delivering this paper (2008), I discovered that Samia Mehrez was thinking along parallel lines. Mehrez considers two of these novels along with others as mappings of Cairo as a shifting socio-political geography. The “urban metaphor” of the apartment building signals a “self-contained” space of organization within urban “haphazardness” (146). We both emphasize the effects of post-“Open Door” policies and the inseparability of local and global forces. But I see the quasi-enclosed space of the house/tenement/wikala as itself “haphazard” and vulnerable or permeable rather than “self-contained”.

2. A narrative more prevalent in Syria (Watenpaugh), its Egyptian correlate is the production of Wust al-balad, Cairo’s old downtown, as a site of nostalgic consumption; see Soliman’s article in this issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

3. Thus the novels debunk the state’s attempts in the 1990s to urge “state enlightenment” (Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd’s term) through cultural policies including republication of secular classics of modern Egyptian literature (Mehrez 18).

4. See Stroińska on “virtual reality” through propaganda as a totalitarian strategy, the “diglossia” which arises to account for the separation of “virtual reality” from “forbidden reality” (narrations of everyday life), and literary strategies of revealing “the deceptive character of the pseudo-reality [ … ] using no other tool but the language of propaganda itself” (126).