That Smell and Notes From Prison Read Free Page B

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
intellectuals 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

 
    W hat’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