Pages: 1 2

The Middle East is a Fiction

Amatoritsero Ede

As cliché as it might sound or read that ‘truth is sometimes stranger than fiction’, the series of persistent symbolic and literal political explosions in the Middle East and North Africa, country after dazed country, proves that truism right once again.

‘…First it was sunny Tunisia, next the jewel, Egypt; Jordan, Yemen and then Bahrain, Syria, inscrutable Libya, until the virus spreads across the hot desert and drove fear into the hearts of Princes, Sheiks and benevolent dictators…’ That preceding sentence could easily begin the epic narrative of the struggle between power and citizenship that the Middle East and North Africa has become. Some of the greatest poets or storytellers from that region could easily have written that novel – Nawal El Sadawi, Mahmud Darwish, Yashar Kemal, Orhan Pamuk, or the younger Hisham Matar or Mohsin Hammid. But I will give precedence to the art of Nobel laureate, Naguib Mahfouz, whose expansive powers is tailor-made to capture the ongoing epic tale, beginning in Egyptian antiquity on the banks of the Nile, and spanning the Northern rims of Africa and the tiniest village on the farthest reach of the dessert.

Mahfouz – because his literary breadth and love of the sublime is obvious in his seminal ambitious plan to write a series of thirty interrelated books – all stories that was to capture the entire sweep of Egyptian history from the time of pharaohs. He only succeeded in giving us three of them – Mockery of the Fates (1939), Rhadopis (1943), and The Struggle of Thebes (1944) before the social and political ferment and urgency of the Egyptian moment dictated that he emphasise the living present. He gave us the monumental Cairo Trilogy of about one thousand and five hundred pages: tale after tale his vision, social conscience, anti-establishment politics, activism and expansive literary range make him the perfect would-be chronicler of the sublime fiction of an ‘impossible’ Arab Spring.

However, the future he envisioned but failed to write is unfolding. I can feel Mahfouz, great socialist and symbol of modern Arab enlightenment, rattle his coffin, realising that life has tricked him; his great tale is being written by a truth that is stranger than any fiction he could have dreamed up: a single personal story in the life of an ordinary man triggers an extraordinary revolution across a whole continent. In Tunisia, Mohammed Bouazizi has become, according to Elizabeth Day in the London Observer of 15th May, 2011, ‘the drop that tipped over the vase’ in the Middle East. Nevertheless and beyond the main facts of the precipitating encounter between a symbol of corrupt officialdom and our Mahfouzian protagonist, Day emphasises that the ongoing revolution is based on a lie – the lie that the revolution was preceded by a slap.

As far as truths go, we could ask with José Eduardo Agualusa’s character, the surrogate father in My Father’s Wives who finally breaks the news of his adult daughter, Laurentina’s, true paternity with the rhetorical defence: “how many truths make up a lie?” The surrogate father, according to Jennie Erdal in the London Guardian of 20th December 2008, “defends his lie on the grounds that it contained many truths, all of them happy.” How ‘happy’ is the lie that on December 17, 2010, an official of a corrupt and repressive Tunisian State, dared to deliver the “slap that sparked a revolution” as Day puts it? Fedia Hamdi is a woman in a fiercely patriarchal Islamic world. How could she have hit a Moslem man in the face as she polices his public fruit and vegetable cart or stall? Due to the ‘insult’, amongst other outrages, the unemployed graduate Mohamed Bouazizi takes a bath in that stupendous source of Arab wealth – gasoline – and lights himself up as if in purification.

While the bare facts are as real as the eyes can see, the embellishments are so fictitiously overwhelming, that the truth of the actual events is eclipsed in the memory of Bouazizi’s mother, who when asked to recount what kind of man her son was replies: “I can’t think of one single memory.” Except, perhaps, that ‘he set himself on fire because a ‘mere’ woman slapped him’? We choose what truths to believe or are conditioned to believe the ‘truthful lie’ and vice-versa. Hamdi, who was scapegoated and jailed by Tunisian officialdom for being the ‘reason’ for the storm in the Middle Eastern cauldron – not just a teacup – has consistently denied slapping an Arab man! Nevertheless, so overwhelming is this one happy lie that it erases the facts and becomes an important narrative in the reality of a new Arab dawn.

Importantly, an indignant Bouazizi sets not only himself but also all of Arabia on fire – not necessarily due to that ‘impossible’ slap but because of the accustomed official injustices that the fiction emphasises. Hamdi is not just a woman but also a policewoman. Bad enough it is when official brutality wears a turban but it becomes an intolerable nightmare when a Hijab frames it. The region bursts into flames of protest against millennial official oppression, unfreedom, corruption, unemployment and dispossession. These are the social injustices Mahfouz wrote about and against. The street is demanding some of what he preached, which attendant democratising and liberal advocacy in his work caused militants to attack him with knife stabs to the neck in 1994 at age 82.

Even if the truth ‘lies’ in the grave with Bouazizi – the myth of the slap was his rumoured claim – the lie is still ‘happy’ enough; that is, the lie is ‘truthful’ enough, to have resulted in a seismic shift in the popular emotion of the Arab world and its relationship to official Islamic power. The means justifies the desired ends – at one remove. At one remove because on the other end of a ‘realistic’ scale, the sort of revolution going on is totally unimaginable except in the realm of a Malfouzian narrative but is at the same time possible because only narrative makes anything possible.

Pages: 1 2