That Smell and Notes From Prison

by Sonallah Ibrahim

  But what is the style of truth telling? Here is where the second, somewhat more surprising feature of these diaries appears, their immersion in American literature and especially in Hemingway. A long series of notes from June 1963 concern Carlos Baker’s book, Hemingway, the Writer as Artist, which had been recently translated into Arabic by the Palestinian scholar Ihsan Abbas. Ibrahim’s notes focus on The Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway’s 1935 account of a hunting trip on the Serengeti Plain. Ibrahim quotes from Baker’s citation of a long discussion between Hemingway and Pop, another hunter, where they discuss what it’s like to witness a revolution. The conversation also serves as a statement of literary method. Hemingway as himself says about revolutions,

  It’s very hard to get anything true on anything you haven’t seen yourself because the ones that fail have such a bad press and the winners always lie so. Then you can only really follow anything in places where you speak the language. That limits you of course. That’s why I would never go to Russia. When you can’t overhear it’s no good. All you get are handouts and sight-seeing. Any one who knows a foreign language in any country is damned liable to lie to you. . . . If I ever write anything about this, it will just be landscape painting until I know something about it. Your first seeing of a country is a very valuable one. Probably more valuable to yourself than to any one else, is the hell of it. But you ought to always write it to try to get it stated. No matter what you do with it.

  You ought to always write it to try to get it stated. The phrase is underlined in Ibrahim’s diary. The Arabic translation reads, “Uktub, uthbit ma tarahu wa-ma tasma‘uhu”: “Write, set down what you see and hear.” It is clear that Ibrahim’s minimalism owes something to Hemingway, a fact I have tried to keep in mind in my own translation. Might this iconic, endlessly imitated style come back to English readers, made strange and new after a detour through Cairo? Ibrahim takes other tips from Hemingway. The technique of italicized flashback, used several times in That Smell, is borrowed from Hemingway’s short story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” But what appears to have struck Ibrahim most about Hemingway is the American writer’s commitment to the quotidian, to the truth of what he sees and hears. Ibrahim proves that this style, unbuttressed by commentary, could make its own revolutionary statement. (Equally interesting, of course, is what Ibrahim doesn’t take from Hemingway: macho posturing is not in his narrator’s repertoire.)

  The third central concern of these notebooks is with the varieties of realism. This was a live issue in Egyptian literary circles at the time. Socialist realism was a dominant mode of the previous decade, most notably in Abd al-Rahman al-Sharaqwi’s The Earth (1952), a novel of class conflict in a village of the Nile Delta. The Earth was celebrated by proponents of engagé literature and spawned a host of imitators. But by the early sixties, in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, socialist realism was considered by many, even on the left, as the house style of Stalinism. Another strain of realism, what we might call classical realism, culminated in the novels of Naguib Mahfouz. His suite of historical fictions, The Cairo Trilogy, is a minute and comprehensive depiction of Egyptian life in the first half of the twentieth century, refracted through the prism of a well-to-do family. But the conventions of classical realism, which presume a relatively stable class system to anchor its ambitious survey of social life, were unable to represent the shifts brought about by Nasser’s reforms. The explosion of a lower middle-class population, largely employed by the expansionist state, and the resultant consumer society with its characteristic entertainments (movies, television, popular clubs) and objects of desire (refrigerators, electronics, suits), proved too much new material to squeeze into the strictures of Mahfouzian technique. In order for realism to remain realistic — this is Ibrahim’s insight — it would have to become experimental.

  In this sense, Notes from Prison can be read as a late episode in the debate between Realism and Modernism among intellectuals such as Georg Lukács, Berthold Brecht, and Walter Benjamin during the 1930s and ’40s — the great age of speculation about the relationship between politics and literature. Those debates were still alive in the pages of La Nouvelle Critique, albeit in simplified form, and both Lukács and Brecht make appearances in Ibrahim’s reading diary. For these writers the chief question was how to create a modern art form that would, in Marx’s words, force mankind “to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives and their relations with fellow men” — with the ambition, ultimately, to transform those conditions. If this goal now seems grandiose, that speaks to the reduced place literature holds in our own life rather than a flaw in the ambition. Ibrahim’s response to this question, as evidenced by the Notes and his novel, was to focus on the terrain of the everyday. His fiction suggests that it is within the workday routine of gossip, casual consumption, and bodily experience — washing, eating, sex — that politics are most immediately felt and known. This is true even or especially when what one feels most of all is the absence of politics. It is his concern for the quotidian that seems to explain Ibrahim’s notes on the films of Italian Neo-Realism and cinema verité. And indeed the narrator of That Smell acts as a kind of camera, recording the life around him while abstaining from comment.

  Except in a few cases, Ibrahim did not have access to the texts mentioned in the Notes in the original language, or even in translation. He did not read the novels or poems, and did not see the films that he worried over for hundreds of pages. Instead, he imagined them as they were described or excerpted in the pages of Cairo’s cultural supplements, French journals, and American magazines. (For this edition, I have tried to locate the works cited by Ibrahim, but have based my translations on the Arabic of the Notes, even when that version is different from the original.) Ibrahim’s Hemingway is, in this sense, a dream of Hemingway, a famous style filtered through a scrim of secondary and tertiary literature, as well as translations. Perhaps this way of reading is what made it easy for Ibrahim to pick and choose what he found useful for his own work. To cobble together bits of Solzhenitsyn with bits of The Green Hills of Africa and bits of other things and come up with a style unique in Arabic literature. This search for models — “influence” is too passive a word to describe what Ibrahim is doing; it is more like bricolage — was made under severe restrictions. His library was limited to whatever the jailers picked up in the kiosks, or friends on the outside thought would be good for him to read. It is not by chance that in later work such as The Committee or Zaat, the protagonists are literary scavengers, collectors of ephemera, people who cannot help picking up the newspaper but never entirely believe what they read there.

  In October of 2003, Ibrahim was given the Arab Novel Award, an honor bestowed by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. To the surprise of many in the audience, familiar with his reputation as a dissident, Ibrahim attended the ceremony and delivered a now legendary speech. Instead of a gracious acceptance, his speech was an uncompromising attack on the Mubarak regime. In Egypt, Ibrahim observed, “We no longer have any theater, cinema, scientific research, or education. Instead, we have festivals and the lies of television.” He went on, “Corruption and robbery are everywhere, but whoever speaks out is interrogated, beaten, and tortured.” In view of this “catastrophe” Ibrahim had no choice but to refuse the prize, “for it was awarded by a government that, in my opinion, lacks the credibility to bestow it.” A little less than eight years later, that regime — or at least its chief officer — was toppled. The role of artists and inte
llectuals in the new Egypt is far from clear. The state’s powers of coercion are formidable and it is possible the old ways of doing things will survive with minor adjustments (increased subsidies for “Islamic” art, for example). But whatever the outcome of the recent revolts, That Smell will remain as an example of self-critical artistry at work in a moment of historical crisis. I hope it may also find an audience in translation.

  ROBYN CRESWELL

  THAT SMELL

  This race and this country and this life produced me. . . . I shall express myself as I am.

  — James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

  What’s your address? the officer said. I don’t have an address, I said. He looked at me, surprised. Then where are you going? Where will you live? I don’t know, I said. I don’t have anyone. He said, I can’t let you go like that. I used to live by myself, I said. We have to know where you’re living so we can come at night, he said. One of the policemen will go with you. And so we went into the street, the policeman and I, and I looked around curiously. It was the moment I’d been dreaming of for years and I searched myself for some feeling that was out of the ordinary, some joy or delight or excitement, but found nothing. People walked and talked and acted as if I’d always been there with them and nothing had happened. The policeman said, Let’s take a taxi, and I saw that he wanted to have an easy time while I paid. We went to my brother’s place and he said to me on the stairs that he was traveling and had to lock up, so we went downstairs and then to my friend’s house. My friend said, My sister’s here, I can’t let you in. We went back down to the street. The policeman was getting annoyed. His eyes had a mean look and I figured that he wanted a few piastres. We can’t go on like this, he said, let’s go to the station. At the station there was another policeman. You’re a problem, he said. We can’t let you go. I sat across from him and set my bag on the floor and lit a cigarette and when it was night he said there was nothing he could do. He called in a third policeman and said, Put him in the holding pen. So they led me to a cell with a fourth policeman standing by the door. He patted me down and took my money and put it in his pocket and pushed me into a big room with a wooden bench all around the walls and I sat down on the bench. There were a lot of men there and the door kept opening to let more in. I felt something in my knee. I put my hand down and sensed something wet. I looked at my hand and found a big patch of blood on my fingers and in the next moment saw swarms of bugs on my clothing and I stood up and noticed for the first time big patches of blood smeared on the walls of the cell and one of the men laughed and said to me, Come here. Some of the men were sitting on the ground and one of them had spread a ratty blanket on the ground and I found a little space on the edge and sat there with my chin on my knees. The man with the blanket said to me, Why don’t you sleep? But there was no room for me, so I said, I’d rather just sit like this. Another one asked me, Drugs? No, I said. Robbery? No, I said. Murder? No. Bribery? No. Counterfeiting? No. So the man got quiet and confused and began looking at me with a strange look. I started to shiver with cold so I got up to walk around, then sat back down. I got tired of sitting and shifted my position. One of the men took out a blanket he had folded beneath him and got ready to sleep. I amused myself chasing the bugs scurrying across the floor and killing them. Then I dropped my head abruptly to my chest. I didn’t want them to see my face. They had begun to fall asleep. In front of me, an old man lay on the bench. The policeman opened the door and called over to him, saying, There’s someone here for you. The old man came back carrying a blanket and a pillow and stretched out on the bench, covering himself with the blanket and resting his head on the pillow and soon he was asleep, breathing heavily, unbothered by the bugs. Next to him a man sat looking right at me with his hands shoved into the pockets of his open jacket, which showed his bare chest. He wasn’t wearing anything underneath the jacket. This man let out a strange and horrible howl then stood up and came over, staring at me and laughing in my face and then sat down next to me. He stared into space, confused. He howled. A big young man got up and hit him in the face. The madman raised his arms to protect his face and said, Don’t hit me. The young man hit him and hit him and I heard the sound of bones cracking. He fell down where he was and he was breathing hard and the others laughed. The man with the blanket gathered up the blanket and spread it over himself and a chubby kid sleeping next to him. Before the blanket covered him, I saw the kid’s face. He had pink skin and pouty lips. He was deep in sleep with his knees drawn up. The man spread the lower part of the blanket on top of him, then wiggled close. I watched his arm beneath the blanket moving across the kid’s body, taking off his pants. The man’s leg pressed against the kid’s back. The big young man who had beaten up the madman sat close by. He followed what was going on beneath the blanket and every so often he raised his eyes to meet with mine. Soon the movements under the blanket stopped and the kid got up, throwing off the cover and rubbing sleep out of his eyes while looking down between his legs. I dozed off. I woke up, still sitting. I didn’t see the big young man, then noticed his leg beneath the blanket. He was asleep with the kid in his arms. I stood up and walked around and the blanket twitched and the young man gathered it up, wrapping it around himself, and the kid lay there with nothing to cover his legs and the darkness began to lighten. I watched the early morning light come in and at last they opened the cell so we could wash up. They made the kid clean the yard. The others brought food and had breakfast and the kid came to the door and said, Didn’t you leave anything for me? And the young man said, No. The policeman began to read off names and I heard my name and got my bag and went out and found my sister waiting for me with yesterday’s policeman. He gave me a little notebook with my name and picture in it and my sister and I went out into the street. Do you want something to drink? she said. I want to walk, I said. She took me to an apartment in Heliopolis and I took some clean clothes and went into the bathroom and shut the door behind me and took off my clothes and stood naked beneath the showerhead. Then I rubbed my body with soap and turned the shower on. I lifted my head and fixed my eyes into the little eyes of the showerhead. The water pouring from it made me blink. I looked down and watched the soap and the water running off my body and onto the floor and into the drain. I rubbed my body with soap again and again I watched the water mixing with the soap and carrying it into the drain. I closed my eyes and stood still beneath the water. Then I turned off the tap and used a towel to dry my body slowly and dressed and walked out and lit a cigarette. My sister said, Let’s go to the cinema, so we did. It was a movie about birds that kept getting bigger and multiplying until they became very wild and went after people and attacked children. I got a terrible headache. We went back to the apartment and my sister busied herself with cleaning. She went from the living room to the kitchen to the bedroom while I smoked and kept away from the window. I took off my clothes and stretched out on the bed. The bell rang so I got up and opened the door and it was the policeman who was knocking. Just a moment, I said. I went quickly to my room and brought the notebook and he wrote his name by the date and left. I went back to the bed and threw myself on top of it and lit a cigarette and stared at the ceiling. The policeman came back. I stayed stretched out on the bed without sleeping. I smoked a lot. In the morning I got up and dressed and went out. I bought a sandwich and all the morning’s papers and caught a metro and watched the car doors closing. I was in the car next to the women’s car and I started examining the women one by one. Their hair was combed in a very
complicated way and their faces were heavy with paint. I got off at Emergency Station and there was a man lying on the sidewalk next to the wall. He was covered with bloody newspapers and a group of women had gathered in the street, wearing black sheets and waving their hands and ululating over him in grief. I got on a bus going to Mona’s house. Her mother met me and I kissed her hand. She didn’t recognize me at first, then we sat down to talk and I had to tell her about her husband. I said that I had been with him until the end.

  I was sitting next to him, my hand cuffed to his. We were in the back of the van with the rest of the vans behind us. He knew what would happen but said nothing. He hummed snatches of an old love song over and over. The wind was stinging and there was nothing to protect us from the cold. I began shivering and my teeth chattered. We couldn’t see the road. We talked about Hemingway. In the darkness, I saw him take a comb from his pocket and run it through his hair, which was going white. I knew he dyed his hair to hide the white. Silence fell over the car. In front of us, Ahmed had wrapped his head with a towel. He was moaning. Whenever his guts shivered, his head ached. It was dawn when we arrived and they forced us out with sticks and we sat on the ground, shaking with cold and fear. He was the tallest one. I heard a voice say, There he is, and they beat him on the head and said, Put your head down, you dog. They began calling people in, then they called him in, and that was the last time I saw him.

  She said, You know, I got a letter from him before that where he said the whole thing would blow over soon. I said to her that he’d told me he’d never been able to sleep with Mona in his arms and that he used to smack his hands together and say, I’ll get out before the rest of you. He wanted to get out at any price. Mona’s mother looked around helplessly and closed her swollen eyelids over her eyes. She dropped her head onto her short, fleshy body. She signaled for me to come close and whispered, Did he really love me? And I said to her, Of course.