Beyond the Caravans and the Time of the Sand

As protean as the god of the sea invoked in the adjective, the genre of the short story takes on a new life in the work of these Egyptian writers - from the short story with its slants of the absurd, the ironic and the macabre of modernity, practised by such great masters of the short story as Edgar Allan Poe, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Ariel Dorfman or Toni Morrison - to the micro-story, through which these writers break new ground for the genre. 
Family relationships within the social and historical context of Egypt, the tension between globalisation and traditional institutions and structures, the experience and struggle of women, and the impacts of militarisation and technology are among the themes explored.

These imaginative and sometimes disturbing stories invite reflection on realism in the everyday, while revealing the existential depth of the instant in relation to memory. Sherif Saleh, May Telmissany and Montasser Al-Qaffash map the affections, the learning and also the misunderstanding between the previous generations of grandparents, fathers and uncles, and the protagonists of their stories, who confront the presence of the past in the present in order to better understand both reality and themselves. 

Sherif Saleh, a journalist who lived in Kuwait for 20 years before returning to Cairo, dramatises this encounter in settings as diverse as the mysterious "palace of the dead", a castle where ghosts come out to meet tourists taking selfies and question the protagonist; the cinematic Café Groppi, where seven men of different ages wait for the same mysterious woman; or the family setting, when ‘the Japanese aunt’, who ‘circled the house like a butterfly in her coloured clothes, raising a fragrant wave here and there’, revolutionises the family hierarchy by her beauty and her foreign origin (p. 88). May Telmissany, recipient of the Medal of the Order of the French Academy and senior lecturer in film and Arabic studies at the University of Ottawa, also addresses the question of family hierarchy from the point of view of a daughter who cares for her elderly father in the knowledge that he will soon die. "There is no room for role reversal now, he will certainly die and I will live on, no one can expect anything else" (p. 98). The father's ageing awakens a journey through the memory of family experiences, and all that is sadly left unsaid in the silence between father and daughter, "one of our languages" (p. 99). Memory is also the vehicle that leads Montasser Al-Qaffash's characters, an Arabic language instructor at the American University in Cairo, to recall indelible episodes of the transition from childhood to youth, such as the advent of the first kiss, or the origins of a family legend surrounding a white chess horse. The horse survives transfers, ‘even though [the grandfather] had not taken care to keep the horse in a safe place. He had abandoned it to his children and then to his grandchildren..... No matter where he appeared, my grandfather repeated his famous question: "How did you get here"(p. 118). 

The absurd, the satirical and the surreal are present in the stories of Gilane El-Shamsy, Mansoura Ez-Eldin, and Safa'a El-Nagar. El-Shamsy, who works as a computer engineer, experiments with the absurd to narrate the change that befalls a group of alienated professionals behind computer screens. The figure of Einstein, whose image appears unusually, becomes a watchword for all those who find his picture in the cubicle, with messages such as "We are here because we look at what is behind the papers" (p. 77). The mystery of the strange apparition leads them to come together to investigate, generating solidarity and transforming their experience. "Sometimes we would split into groups, each group staying alone for an hour so that no one would notice that a considerable number of the office workers were missing at the same time" (p. 79). At the same time, Einstein's image continues to multiply in the office until it reaches the big boss, with unexpected results. 

Mansoura Ez-Eldin, an award-winning writer who has published two collections of short stories and four novels, recalls Poe's haunting tale "William Wilson" through her story "The Castle of the Sun". Ez-Eldin's protagonist recounts in the first person the life of a man possessed by the desire to capture the design of a castle which he draws obsessively, so much so that his neighbours "became accustomed to his strange words and actions" (91). The obsession with capturing the design causes the man to disappear and the protagonist to take his place, also by repeating drawings, to the point that "everyone said he had lost his mind" (93). However, in a surreal twist, the villagers begin to claim that they have seen the castle on the outskirts of the village. Ez-Eldin offers a complex allegory of creation and the extent to which it changes both the artist and his environment. 
The haunting of absence impacts on translator and writer Safa'a El-Nagar's tale of a devout dervish caring for her grandson after the death of her daughter. Despite reproach from the rest of her children for her religious devotion, "Mama, it is not right to put your hands over your heart while praying!", (p. 106), and the admiration of the wise Shaykh Hussein, the Hayya persists in her faith as a manifestation of individuality. "Everything around her contradicted her visions and dreams" (p. 106). The Hajjah's visionary ability becomes a narrative vehicle for El-Nagar, who blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy when the Hajjah has a vision of her deceased daughter that heralds a tragedy, like the ghost daughter in Beloved. She "began to bifurcate" until she catches a glimpse of a group of women who extract her heart, and she sees her daughter and grandson again, perhaps for the last time (p.108).

Hassan Abel Mawgoud and Tareq Imam break new ground for the micro-story, bringing readers into both the texture of everyday life and the confines of the imagination. The imaginative and deeply human micro-stories of Mawgoud, who has published two novels and two collections of short stories, draw on childhood, and from the adult point of view decipher their incomprehensible moments, when they do not speak of historical characters, such as King Fuad, or imaginary ones, such as the two prisoners playing pretend chess. In the story about the neighbour Hanna, who "had the habit of dreaming for her family, for her friends, and for us, her neighbours’" he shows this game of perspective. One day, Hanna gives the boy money from his father. The resolution paradoxically comes in a question: "I closed the door while reflecting on my father's behaviour: why did he never give me the money in person, preferring to send it to strangers" (p. 64). 

Tareq Imam's innovative approach takes the micro-story into the realm of poetry, in which the Earth becomes the protagonist. His is a planetary yet urbane vision of earthly life, from his meditation on the moon to the world turning upside down: ‘The world turned upside down. That meant we were walking on the sky, looking down on the streets from above’ (p. 127), or the city, which “makes everyone partners in departure, brothers in its teeming blood” (p. 132). Some of Imam's micro-stories recall the greguerías of Ramon Gómez de la Serna for their biting irony, especially in the section "Haikus de la ciudad", where his observations take on the poetic and irreverent gaze of the flâneur: "Some dogs guard the dreams of their masters. Tied with chains, they bite those who are awake" (p. 128). Movement through urban spaces characterises Imam's poetic gaze, even in the poem dedicated to the distinguished Egyptian poet Ahmad Yamani. "The word moved, left its place like a passenger whom the driver takes off a bus" (130). 
The gaze of the writers gathered in this issue unveils a contemporary and dynamic Egypt, involved in a transformation that in turn brings new questions to memory - both individual and collective - to glimpse something of the future in the wonder that disappears almost instantly through human intervention: in Imam's words, "The earth sees the sky as a huge clothesline dripping on it, and every time a drop of light falls from it, a hand sweeps it into the gutter". Whether through Einstein, the castles that call to us, childhood memories, or devout passion, that light shines through the stories of these writers. 
 
Joselyn Michelle Almeida
 
(1) Borges once derived the metonymy from Percy Shelley's ‘Ozymandias’.

Joselyn Michelle Almeida, PhD. is the author of the poetry collection Condiciones para el vuelo (Libros del Mississippi, Madrid 2019) and of several studies and articles on Anglo-Hispanic philology. She studied classics and English philology at Tufts University, and received her PhD in philosophy and letters from Boston College.  Her professional experience covers the field of language and literature as a lecturer and researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and other American universities, and as an editor and translator. Among others, she has been a Fulbright and National Endowment for the Arts scholar in the USA.