{"id":9,"date":"2011-03-07T21:28:24","date_gmt":"2011-03-07T21:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtls.ca\/test\/?page_id=9"},"modified":"2012-03-07T12:44:51","modified_gmt":"2012-03-07T12:44:51","slug":"editorial","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/editorial\/","title":{"rendered":"Editorial"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Middle East is a Fiction<\/strong><\/h1>\n
Amatoritsero Ede<\/h6>\n

As clich\u00e9 as it might sound or read that \u2018truth is sometimes stranger than fiction\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n

\u2018\u2026First 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\u2026\u2019 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

Mahfouz \u2013 because his literary breadth and love of the sublime is obvious in his seminal ambitious plan to write a series of thirty interrelated books \u2013 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 \u2013 Mockery of the Fates<\/em> (1939), Rhadopis<\/em> (1943), and The Struggle of Thebes<\/em> (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 \u2018impossible\u2019 Arab Spring.<\/p>\n

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, \u2018the drop that tipped over the vase\u2019 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 \u2013 the lie that the revolution was preceded by a slap.<\/p>\n

As far as truths go, we could ask with Jos\u00e9 Eduardo Agualusa\u2019s character, the surrogate father in My Father\u2019s Wives<\/em> who finally breaks the news of his adult daughter, Laurentina\u2019s, true paternity with the rhetorical defence: \u201chow many truths make up a lie?\u201d The surrogate father, according to Jennie Erdal in the London Guardian of 20th December 2008, \u201cdefends his lie on the grounds that it contained many truths, all of them happy.\u201d How \u2018happy\u2019 is the lie that on December 17, 2010, an official of a corrupt and repressive Tunisian State, dared to deliver the \u201cslap that sparked a revolution\u201d 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 \u2018insult\u2019, amongst other outrages, the unemployed graduate Mohamed Bouazizi takes a bath in that stupendous source of Arab wealth \u2013 gasoline \u2013 and lights himself up as if in purification.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s mother, who when asked to recount what kind of man her son was replies: \u201cI can\u2019t think of one single memory.\u201d Except, perhaps, that \u2018he set himself on fire because a \u2018mere\u2019 woman slapped him\u2019? We choose what truths to believe or are conditioned to believe the \u2018truthful lie\u2019 and vice-versa. Hamdi, who was scapegoated and jailed by Tunisian officialdom for being the \u2018reason\u2019 for the storm in the Middle Eastern cauldron \u2013 not just a teacup \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

Importantly, an indignant Bouazizi sets not only himself but also all of Arabia on fire \u2013 not necessarily due to that \u2018impossible\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Even if the truth \u2018lies\u2019 in the grave with Bouazizi \u2013 the myth of the slap was his rumoured claim \u2013 the lie is still \u2018happy\u2019 enough; that is, the lie is \u2018truthful\u2019 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 \u2013 at one remove. At one remove because on the other end of a \u2018realistic\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

The moral is that it is \u2018narrative\u2019 which creates an objective world that we then invest with \u2018reality\u2019, with meaning; that the reality we construct rules our lives, sinks into the unconscious and settles heavily with the force of \u2018divine\u2019 truth. The objective world mirrors fiction because our realities are moulded by stories we tell ourselves and invest with \u2018truth\u2019 \u2013 as Laurentina\u2019s surrogate father does in Agualusa\u2019s story. It is not for nothing that fiction is believable, that we suspend disbelief while watching a movie, a play or while reading a story \u2013 because if you can imagine it, then it is possible, so to speak. In short, we create and negotiate reality. This is because as opposed to those mimetic theories, which insist that fiction mirrors the objective world, sometimes the objective world mimics fiction. This is particularly so when, and since, our reality are human constructions that have no solidity in any \u2018real\u2019 world \u2018out there\u2019 \u2013 if we are willing to suspend the fiction of the \u2018divine\u2019 or \u2018natural\u2019 for a minute.<\/p>\n

In Arabia the man in the street has broken his shackles, which was welded together in the smithy of the stories he has been told \u2013 religious stories, myths of origins, and nationalisms, of the infallible and benevolent cult figure of the leader \u2013 next-of-kin to \u2018God\u2019, in whose name the former demands, commands, indeed wills a blind, iron allegiance to a repressive Islamic state. In sit-com-like moments besieged political leader after leader told and still tells alternative stories, selling fictions, rewriting events in contradiction to global public knowledge of facts. Saif Al-Islam, Muammar Gaddafi\u2019s son and official megaphone, has been a more consummate spinner of tales than anyone else. He is like the black albino in Agualusa\u2019s The Book of Chameleons<\/em>, \u201cwhose profession it is to invent \u2018better pasts\u2019 for Angola\u2019s new elite.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saif Al-Islam invents \u2018better pasts\u2019 with Gaddafian truculence to legitimise his dynasty\u2019s inordinate desire to hold unto power. He insults the intelligence of the global public in proclaiming like \u2018God\u2019 that \u2018there is no problem\u2019, \u2018the people of Libya are happy with their leader\u2019, \u2018there are no riots or disaffection.\u2019 To do this he inhabits an in-between world of mirrors. He loses himself in his own fictional and imaginary world and becomes delusional \u2013 much like a cartoon figure as he lies away copiously on the TV screen, mouthing words that have no referent of meaning in the face of riots, albeit officially denied, which raged on Libyan streets and, finally led to the ongoing civil war in that country. Lies, when told often enough, become true. Every propagandist knows this. In Erdgal\u2019s review of Agualusa\u2019s The Books of Chameleons<\/em>\u00a0 \u201c[o]ne character [\u2026] \u2013\u00a0 a novelist \u2013 when pressed to say whether he writes lies deliberately or out of ignorance, declares that he is a liar by vocation, indeed he lies with joy. Fictions, so we are to understand, are uniquely suited to getting at truths.\u201d While that is true for didactic purposes, it is clear that the stories we tell ourselves create our reality.<\/p>\n

It is well known that Mahfouz was branded an apostate by the Islamic right. He was hounded in late life, threatened and attacked viciously. But he is getting his revenge. In the scriptural novel \u2013 much like Children of Gebelawi<\/em> \u2013 which Mahfouz writes from the grave and which is now filming in the Middle East, he irritates the religious right. In his sublime fashion he sets up to fictionalise the Bible, the Al Quran, Bhagavad-Gita or Srimad Bhagavatam, the Mahabharata and so on. As preface he poses the disclaimer: \u2018These are works of fiction. All names, places, characters, and incidents are a product of the author\u2019s imagination. This is why\u2026first it was sunny Tunisia, next the jewel, Egypt;\u00a0 \u2026\u2019 Mahfouz writes like this to let us know that his fictionalisation of the scriptures is not fiction precisely because it is fiction. We are (not) free to believe what we want. The streets of Syria, Jordan, Bahrain, Libya, Saudi Arabia etc prove him right. They now believe other stories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Middle East is a Fiction Amatoritsero Ede As clich\u00e9 as it might sound or read that \u2018truth is sometimes stranger than fiction\u2019, 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. \u2018\u2026First it was sunny Tunisia, next […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-9","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":890,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9\/revisions\/890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}