That Smell
&
Notes from Prison
Sonollah Ibrahim
Edited and translated
by Robyn Creswell
A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK
Contents
Translator’s Introduction
That Smell
Introduction to the 1986 edition of That Smell
by Sonollah Ibrahim
Notes from Prison
Translator’s Introduction
Sonallah Ibrahim’s first book, That Smell, was published in Cairo in 1966. The print run was quickly confiscated, though not before a few copies were passed on to local critics, who were almost as unwelcoming as the censors. Yahya Haqqi, one of the grand old men of Egyptian letters and one of Ibrahim’s early mentors, wrote that he was “nauseated” by the novel, lamenting “its lack of sensibility, its lowness, its vulgarity.” Illegal and abbreviated editions subsequently appeared in Egypt and abroad, but it was only in 1986 that a complete edition was published in Cairo. By that time, Ibrahim had become an established novelist and That Smell was recognized, especially by young writers, as a watershed in Arabic literature — a work of sly sophistication and prescient critique, a fiction to frighten the status quo.
It is not obvious, especially to foreign readers at a distance of almost fifty years, why this short work provoked such a violent response. The reaction of the authorities, which Ibrahim recounts with exasperated amusement in his introduction to the 1986 edition (translated here as an afterword), focused on the novel’s representation of sexual matters. But these scenes, which are brief and rather chaste, do not explain such hostility. In fact, there is little in the story that strikes one as explicitly subversive. It begins with an unnamed narrator being released from prison, followed by scenes of his visits to family and friends while re-familiarizing himself with Cairo, his native city. At night he signs a register of house arrest brought to his door by a policeman. The human setting, as with much of Ibrahim’s fiction, is lower-middle-class: government clerks, newspapermen, low-ranking army officers. There is not much plot in the conventional sense and the narrator’s tone is remarkably blank. He makes no attempt to set his story within a larger historical context, nor does he pass judgment on the things he sees and hears. The story’s central drama, such as it is, revolves around his sporadic attempts to write, though what he is trying to compose is never clear (a novel, a poem, a letter?). Even in this case, not much happens. Confronted by an empty page, he usually ends up smoking or masturbating or spying on his neighbors rather than writing.
That Smell is essentially a roman à clef. When he wrote the novel in his late twenties, Ibrahim himself had just been released from prison. He was arrested for political conspiracy in 1959, along with most other Egyptian Communists, during a round-up ordered by the president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had came to power in a military coup in 1952. Ibrahim was given a seven-year sentence of hard labor and ended up serving five, most of them in al-Wahat prison camp in Egypt’s Western Desert. Conditions in the jail were harsh. Prisoners were tortured, several were beaten to death. The narrator of That Smell has also been a political prisoner, though this is implied rather than stated. In one of the opening scenes, he spends the night in a holding pen before being released back onto the streets (another autobiographical detail). A fellow inmate asks what he is in for — drugs? robbery? counterfeiting? — only to be met with a series of denials. Here, as elsewhere in the novel, politics is what cannot be mentioned, or what no one will talk about except indirectly. This unspoken taboo extends to the narrator, who never gives his opinion about life under the military regime, or its treatment of political opponents. Ibrahim’s writing style is a kind of corollary to this. It is a style defined by all the things it leaves out: metaphors, adjectives, authorial commentary. His narrator has the impassivity of a trauma victim: he sees and hears and reports, but makes no claim to understand. This minimalism shocked contemporary Arabic readers. Many found Ibrahim’s style more disquieting than the story’s themes or content. Even now it is not easy to see how he arrived at this way of writing, which breaks so violently with the norms of literary Arabic.
Ibrahim’s experience as a Communist is central to his novel. One might even understand his later career as a writer as an attempt to remain faithful to the history of that movement, long after the Egyptian party ceased to exist. In an autobiographical essay about his years as a militant, Ibrahim claims that when he became a Communist in 1954 it was in part for literary reasons. As a young reader, he had a passion for policiers and historical swashbucklers — Robin Hood, The Three Musketeers, Captain Blood, and the stories of Arsène Lupin. (Traces of this passion for the pulps are still evident in the overheated fantasies of That Smell, as well as the appearance of the radio show, “The Shadow,” in the closing sequence.) By the time he was seventeen, Ibrahim was involved in clandestine political work for Haditu, an acronym for the Democratic Movement for National Liberation, one faction in Egypt’s patchwork of Marxist movements. “There is no doubt,” Ibrahim writes, “that my commitment to clandestine activities stemmed from the adventure stories I loved so much,” stories that had also taught him the virtues of “sincerity, loyalty, self-sacrifice, asceticism, and chivalry.”
The ups and downs of the Egyptian Communist party are notoriously difficult to track. This volatility is partly due to factionalism and partly to the movement’s shifting attitudes toward President Nasser. The party was always small and there were almost as many intellectuals as workers. When the first cells and study groups were founded in the 1930s, the party was mostly led by well-to-do Egyptian Jews. These were committed internationalists and anti-fascists, wary of the chauvinism they perceived in Egypt’s Islamist and nationalist parties. (The early prominence of Jews in many Arab Communist parties would compromise recruitment efforts, especially after the establishment of Israel in 1948.) The Communists initially welcomed the coup of 1952, which put an end to the monarchy of Farouk and, soon after, the British occupation of Egypt. But the honeymoon was short. Twenty days after seizing power, the ruling clique violently suppressed a strike by textile workers and executed two labor leaders. Among the leftists, rumors began to circulate that the CIA had had a role in the takeover. The next four years were characterized by tensions between the Communists and Nasser, as well as between different factions within the movement, whose activists disagreed over whether or not to support the new regime. When Ibrahim joined Haditu in 1954, it was among those factions that enthusiastically backed the officers.
In the aftermath of the Suez War of 1956, having faced down Britain, France, and Israel, Nasser was at the height of his powers. He was a popular leader in the movements for anti-colonialism and pan-Arabism, and he soon emerged, along with Tito and Nehru, as a driving force in the Non-Aligned Movement. Egyptian Communists had little choice except to get behind him. But the regime never returned these friendly feelings. In 1958, a coup by Iraqi officers seemed to signal that country’s turn toward communism and away from pan-Arabism, and Nasser began to worry about his domestic reds. This was the proximate cause for the arrests of 1959, in which Ibrahim was caught up. The consistent support his faction had given Nasser ended up counting for nothing.
/> One irony of this story is that it was during the years of Ibrahim’s imprisonment, in the early 1960s, that Egypt turned decisively toward the Soviet Union in foreign policy and toward socialism on the domestic front, with ambitious programs of nationalizations and land reform. Cultural relations also became closer. Many Egyptian intellectuals made the trip to Moscow — Ibrahim spent a year there in the early seventies studying film — and Cairo’s literary journals were full of the news from the USSR, in particular the rise of liberal-minded poets such Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky. This new closeness between Nasser and the Soviets led to a number of surreal instances in which Egyptian Communists publicly and voluntarily expressed their support for a regime that had jailed and tortured them. A further irony is that Ibrahim and many others were granted an early release from prison in 1964 only because of Khrushchev’s visit to celebrate the construction of the Aswan Dam, designed and financed by the USSR. The Soviets noted that the Premier could hardly make Nasser a Hero of the Soviet Union when Egyptian jails were full of Communists. Less than a year later, the two largest Communist parties in Egypt met and voted to dissolve themselves, instructing their memberships to enroll in Nasser’s newly formed Arab Socialist Union. They hoped to have some influence on the regime’s policies by shaping them from the inside, but this was not to be. As Joel Beinin, a historian of the Arab left, has written, “The Egyptian communists were caught up by their embrace of the national movement and ultimately destroyed by it.”
This convoluted history of alliance, enmity, and cooptation is the prelude to That Smell. The narrator’s stupor is the daze of depoliticization, a sense that the large battles have already been fought and lost. In his meetings with friends and family, the talk is mostly about marriage, the newest American appliances, and how to get ahead in the new bureaucracies. That Smell is a political novel in the sense that it evokes, from the inside, the feeling of life after politics. It registers the cooling temperatures and lowered expectations of a moment when Nasser’s “holy march” toward Arab unity has stalled in the sands of economic reality and popular disaffection.
The most pervasive symptom of this stagnation, in Ibrahim’s fiction, is sexual. The narrator of That Smell is a prototype for the heroes of his later novels: a bookish loner whose encounters with women, real or imagined, are awkward and anticlimactic. His one meeting with a prostitute turns into a comedy of errors. It is the narrator’s sexual powerlessness that seems to have most worried the Egyptian censors. In his 1986 introduction, Ibrahim writes of being interrogated by an officer in the Ministry of Information shortly after the novel was printed. Why does the hero refuse to sleep with the prostitute, the official wants to know? Can’t he get it up? The censors were presumably more comfortable with the virile heroes of socialist realism — the dominant form for the novel in Egypt at the time — who were forever building dams, making speeches, and machine-gunning the Zionists. But it is Ibrahim’s novel that was more attuned to its times. It is now often seen as a work that foreshadowed the humiliation of the 1967 War, a novel that told the truth about Egyptian impotence even as the regime trumpeted its fictions of victory.
I’ve noted that there is a little mystery about how Ibrahim arrived at the style of his first work, a style that is at once simple and strange, or strange because it seems so simple. Compared to Egyptian writers of the previous generation — Naguib Mahfouz, Tawfik al-Hakim, Taha Hussein — Ibrahim’s prose is very plain. The syntax is straightforward and even monotonous (a monotony that is meant in part to mimic the dreary routines of the narrator’s life under house arrest). There are no spiraling clauses and only the most basic transitions, usually “and” or “then.” There are no ten-dollar words, only everyday nouns and verbs. It is a style that is aggressively unliterary. Reading it, one feels Ibrahim forcing the native eloquence of Arabic prose to make room for a degree of inelegance and even ugliness. This inelegance, so disturbing to the novel’s original readers, is one of the elements I find lacking in the previous English translation, The Smell of it & other stories (1971), by Denys Johnson-Davies. In that edition, Ibrahim’s lower-middle-class characters speak a plummy version of English and the unbroken block of the original Arabic text — a layout that fits the stream-of-consciousness narrative — is transformed into tidy paragraphs and indented dialogue.
For some hints about how he arrived at this intentionally unstylish style of writing, and also for some sense of Ibrahim’s life in prison, we can turn to the Yawmiyat al-Wahat, translated here as Notes from Prison. This is a series of journal entries Ibrahim wrote during his last two years in prison, from the spring of 1962 to the spring of 1964. In November 1963, Ibrahim transferred the contents of these secret notebooks to Turkish Bafra-brand cigarette papers, to make them easier to smuggle out. Excerpts from this archive first appeared in the Cairene magazine al-Hilal in 2003. The full diary, with accompanying notes and an introduction by Ibrahim, was published the following year. He summarized its contents in this way: “Writing and its difficulties, the role of the writer and his formation, the many contradictory theories of the novel — these considerations take up a large portion of my notebooks.” In the earlier entries Ibrahim dreams of a heroic writer who will “dive into the depths of the people” and “reveal the way forward”; later entries are increasingly concerned with questions of technique and style. The Arabic version runs to well over a hundred pages. For the purposes of this translation, I have selected only a small portion, about one fifth of the total. Many of the notes concern writing projects that never came to fruition, or would require context beyond the scope of this edition. I have focused instead on those entries I take to be relevant to the composition of That Smell. Read in this way, as prolegomena to the novel, they offer a fascinating glimpse into Ibrahim’s procedures as a reader and a writer.
“Prison was my university,” Ibrahim writes in his own introduction to the Notes, and indeed the entries read at times like a syllabus, or a wish list for future reading. “Must read Ulysses,” he writes in December 1962, when he was twenty-five years old. And three months later, “Must read Proust.” The diaries have relatively little to say about prison routine or with Ibrahim’s personal life, in part because he feared the notes might be seized and used against him. Nevertheless, a picture does emerge between the lines of an intensely intellectual environment. Most of the Communists’ reading seems to have been acquired through the prison guards, who occasionally spent a week in Cairo or Alexandria and were easily bribed. Cultural supplements from Cairene newspapers formed a large part of the prisoners’ reading. An ex-leader of the party, Henri Curiel, who arranged for the prisoners’ legal defense from his exile in Paris, also sent copies of La Nouvelle Critique, which one of the French-speaking inmates would translate for the rest. The arrival of Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy caused such excitement that the prisoners drew up a waiting list for readers. During the day, the inmates buried their library in the sand outside the cells. (This same bookish and clandestine milieu was cultivated by Muslim Brotherhood prisoners, who shared jails with the Communists, though the two groups kept mostly to themselves. Indeed, much of modern Egyptian intellectual history was born in Nasser’s prisons.)
Three central interests stand out in Ibrahim’s diaries. The first is the importance of literature from the USSR. Soviet culture was viewed by the Egyptian Communists as a mirror, a model, and a warning. It was more advanced, but also more damaged than their own. The diary is full of the news about Novy Mir, the So
viet monthly that briefly served as a forum for liberal opposition in the wake of de-Stalinization. For fathomable reasons, one of the first books Ibrahim read after his release is Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, first published in Novy Mir in 1962. There are several entries that hint at connections Ibrahim was making between Soviet and Egyptian experience, often by way of citation rather than commentary. In May of 1963, he reproduces a passage by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, among the most famous poets in the world at the time (now hardly read), whose memoirs were being serialized in the French magazine L’Express: “To explain away the cult of Stalin’s personality by saying that it was imposed by force is, to say the least, rather naïve,” Yevtushenko writes. “Many genuine Bolsheviks arrested at that time refused to believe that this had happened with his knowledge, still less on his personal instructions. Some of them, after being tortured, traced the words ‘Long Live Stalin’ in their own blood on the walls of their prison.” Given what Ibrahim says elsewhere about the Egyptian Communists’ perverse relation to Nasser, which he describes as “absolute support from our side; repression and murder from his side,” it is easy to see why this particular anecdote jumped out at him.
Ibrahim’s dilemma might be thought of in this way: how to write oppositional art when the regime in power has already stolen your best lines? The attractiveness of Yevtushenko, it would seem, is that he briefly supplied a model for how one might remain a Communist despite communism — or, as he writes in his memoir, how one maintains “faith in the original purity of the revolutionary idea despite all the filth that has since desecrated it.” It is from the Soviet writers that Ibrahim gets his obsession with “telling the truth,” an idea that crops up incessantly in the writings of Yevtushenko and others quoted in the Notes. For the Soviets, this meant telling the truth about Stalin and the Gulag. For Ibrahim, it meant telling the truth about Nasserism.
That Smell and Notes From Prison Page 1
