That Smell and Notes From Prison Read Free

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.
    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