BOOK REVIEWS
CHICAGO
A Novel by ALAA AL ASWANY
Publisher: HarperCollins (New York), 2008
Translated by: Farouk Abdel Wahab
Reviewed by Adel Iskandar
Cover design: Emily Cavett Taff
Al Aswany’s first blockbuster Novel
Since the revered Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, the father of the modern Arabic novel, few authors writing in Arabic have had as much an impact outside of the Arab world as Alaa Al Aswany. Born in 1957, Al Aswany is the son of Egypt lawyer and writer Abbas Al Aswany. His debut title The The Yacoubian Building, translated to 20 languages, was a runaway success throughout the region and seemed to spread like wildfire everywhere. With publishers somewhat mum about the actual sales figures, most believe it was in the millions. The book was later made into a star-studded blockbuster film which was touted as the costliest cinematic production in the history of Arab production. Much has been said about The Yacoubian Building book by the dentist-turned-novelist that anticipation reached a crescendo about his much publicized second book. Portions of this book, later entitled Chicago, were published as a series of sequential stories in the Egyptian independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm to increased readership and encouraging reviews. While it is difficult to articulate a specific literary style for Al Aswany from his first two novels yet there appears to be a vernacular pattern in his composition which has drawn both salutations and admonishment of readers and critics.
One clear characteristic of his work has been the role of the authorial voice, especially that which expresses explicit confluence with the autobiographical essence of the writer himself. In addition to the narration by a speaker who usually serves as the protagonist and the society’s conscience, Al Aswany seems to inject into the narrative markers of his own personal experiences in a fashion that may go unnoticed by the reader. For instance, in The Yacoubian Building, many older readers especially literary contemporaries of his late father, lawyer and writer Abbas Al Aswany, remarked that the plot and the characters were all too familiar and that Alaa may have either been greatly influenced by his father’s stories and writings or that he may have otherwise channelled him during the composition phase. Some went as far as saying that the book may have been partially written by his father Abbas to explain the author’s intimate knowledge of that era in Egypt’s history.
Alaa Al Aswany’s second novel, Chicago, was published in 2007 by Cairo’s Dar El-Shorouk to wide critical acclaim. Based almost entirely on the trials and tribulations of several Egyptians in the Windy City, the book delves into a plethora of issues affecting these students, migrants, and expatriates. Here Alaa is far more explicit in selecting a personal niche for his story, inadvertently reminiscing about the time he spent studying dentistry at the University of Illinois, in Chicago. The novel is enmeshed in the fabric of an Egyptian dislocated community, a culturally charged enclave on lake Michigan, with the author drawing stark frames from the outset around several prototypical personalities with specific Arab exilic qualities each representing a conglomeration of traits he may very well have encountered during his years in Chicago. These include the conservative veiled graduate student Shaymaa, the uprooted Coptic professor of surgery Karam Doss, the "Americanized" father Ra’fat, the Egyptian regime’s operative Danana, the angst-ridden liberal democracy activist Nagi, and his entrapped, dissatisfied and disillusioned wife Marwa. Each of these characters (or perhaps stereotypes) embody a sensibility, not unlike those which exist within most Arab migrant communities.
Like Father, Like Son?
Literary and lawyer Abbas Al Aswany
To contextualize and historicize much of Alaa Al Aswany’s work, one must revisit his late father’s legacy which impacted the young writer and appears to occupy a subterranean position within all his works, including Chicago. While Abbas Al Aswany seemed very much present in The Yacoubian Building, many hailed Chicago as Alaa’s intellectual weaning from his father’s legacy with a narrative solely his own in a context and time period exclusively contemporary to his experience. As the new book continues to exceed the sales of its precursor, Chicago’s engagement with the migrant experience which Abbas could not articulate, is nonetheless replete with Alaa’s subliminal homages (conscious or otherwise) to his father.
Cafe Riche in downtown Cairo which was the regular stomping ground for Egyptian thinkers and dissidents including Abbas Al Aswany
His father Abbas Al Aswany is remembered a captivating and charismatic speaker with a broad following and loyalty within a cross-section of the Egyptian revolutionary intelligentsia particularly in the years immediately prior and after the revolution of 1952. He spent many days and nights at the iconic Cafe Riche in downtown Cairo which had become his informal office–a place where he greeted friends, colleagues, clients, admirers and passersby. Anyone who knew Abbas at the time spoke of his charm and his extroverted disposition and attractive demeanour. His son Alaa, while sharing his father’s incisive literary commentary, acute analytical capabilities, and to an extent his political views, is contrastingly soft-spoken, humble, reserved, withdrawn and exceptionally courteous. This was startlingly obvious when I attended a book signing he held in Washington, DC in October 2008. Like his father who wrote a regular back-page essay in the Egyptian weekly magazine Rose El-Youssef entitled "Aswaniyaat," Alaa too has become a regular contributor to Egyptian daily and weekly newspapers and magazine. Both Abbas and Alaa exhibited literary interests apart from their vocations. With the likes of Anton Chekov and Youssef Idris being both physicians and novelists, the dentist Alaa continues in a long tradition of doctors who chose literature as an arena for meditation and aesthetic expression.
Fanning the Flames of Change
Cover of the film The Yacoubian Building based on Al Aswany’s book
The first four of forty chapters in Chicago contextualize the city’s history and societal make up anchoring its renaissance on a cataclysmic event. That is the tragedy of the infamous Chicago fire which burnt down much of the metropolitan area and laid it to waste. While the fire itself and the city’s ability to recoup from the debris to become a burgeoning enclave is an allegory for the relationships forged there by the book’s characters, each an attempt to carve out a space with resilience and ambition. Yet while the city prevails over the fire, reigning supreme with grandeur over its sins and tribulations, the characters of the textual Chicago are battered by exile and ghorba (estrangement) and wallow in the despair brought about by the toils of assimilation. It is as though the spoils of the new country are spoiled by the old country.
Incidentally, some 56 years before Chicago’s publication, another fire erupted in Cairo on June 26, 1952 which burnt down most of the establishments, banks, stores and commercial centers in the city center. Al Aswany’s father, Abbas, was arrested as a prime suspect, having been a prominent political operative in the Misr El-Fatah (Young Egypt) party which later became the Socialist Labour Party and having served as a bastion of public dissidence against the crown and British presence. Just days before the fire, Abbas Al Aswany had recited a poem to a demonstration of protesters where he chanted "أما جلاء لوادي النيل مكتمل أو إن يسيل من الخصم الحشاشات" ("Either a complete evacuation from the Nile Valley or the from the opponent the viscera will stream"), what the authorities saw to be an explicit advocacy of violence against the regime. After four days in custody, Abbas was released for lack of evidence after an elderly Armenian-Egyptian witness to arson mercifully dismissed him as the perpetrator after learning that if charged the suspect will be executed.
According to Egyptian veteran journalist and writer Youssef El-Sherif who was a friend of Abbas Al Aswany, this experienced weighted greatly on the late lawyer-writer. Hence, it seems uncanny that his son spent an inordinate amount of space in Chicago explaining the impact of the Chicago fire as a product of an innocent act which retrospectively helped purify and cleanse the city, creating a sense of community and solidarity among its inhabitants irrespective of their backgrounds. Is there a covert nod to his father’s intimate run-in with a similar fire some 10,000km and 81 years apart?!
Youssef El-Sherif’s book What Happened on the Coast of Egypt (Dar El-Shorouk, 2006)
Another curious story also relayed by Youssef El-Sherif in his 2006 book entitled Mima Jara fi Bar Misr "What Happened on the Coast of Egypt" tells a story of Abbas impersonating an Ethiopian diplomat to meet with the Iranian revolutionary leader Dr. Mohammad Moussadeq who was on an o
المزيد
