أحمد ناجي's Blog, page 2
January 7, 2017
The plant (short story) translated by: Mona Karem
will not come through the door or the window,
but as a plant you cannot notice with your naked eye.
I will grow day after day, to the sound of your singing and the rhythm of your breath at night. A small plant you will not notice at first, growing beneath your bed.
From door to bed, to bathroom to closet, standing or sitting against the mirror. Through all these acts, and to the sound of your humming, I will grow. A small green plant. With grand slim leaves sneaking out from beneath your bed.
I once read about plants that survive on light and prey on other creatures. With their glowing green leaves, they surround them and lure them in with a pleasing, lustful smell, then devour them. For hours and days and years, sucking on them. Sucking your toes one by one, making my way up.
What should I do with the bee? What should I tell the flower?
You become one with the flower. You grow up. You become a tree. While I remain a plant, in need of your humming, awaiting a song. A part of me is falling every morning, and I cannot catch it. A part of me flies off every time I lie in bed. But when I wake up I cannot remember what.
Sometimes I am reminded to look under the bed. But I don’t find the green plant. Nor do I find you.
but as a plant you cannot notice with your naked eye.
I will grow day after day, to the sound of your singing and the rhythm of your breath at night. A small plant you will not notice at first, growing beneath your bed.
From door to bed, to bathroom to closet, standing or sitting against the mirror. Through all these acts, and to the sound of your humming, I will grow. A small green plant. With grand slim leaves sneaking out from beneath your bed.
I once read about plants that survive on light and prey on other creatures. With their glowing green leaves, they surround them and lure them in with a pleasing, lustful smell, then devour them. For hours and days and years, sucking on them. Sucking your toes one by one, making my way up.
What should I do with the bee? What should I tell the flower?
You become one with the flower. You grow up. You become a tree. While I remain a plant, in need of your humming, awaiting a song. A part of me is falling every morning, and I cannot catch it. A part of me flies off every time I lie in bed. But when I wake up I cannot remember what.
Sometimes I am reminded to look under the bed. But I don’t find the green plant. Nor do I find you.
January 6, 2017
Farewell to the youth
Editor’s note: The author of this piece was sentenced to two years in prison on February 20, 2016, on charges of public indecency in relation to the publishing of a chapter of his novel, Istikhdam al-Haya (Using Life), in Akhbar Al-Adab newspaper. Authors and writers have expressed solidarity with Naji, considering the ordeal a flagrant violation of freedom of expression and creativity.
I first saw the beast in 2005, in downtown Cairo, in front of the Journalists Syndicate steps. Young men and women gathered and chanted “kifaya” (enough). The beast, dressed in military uniform, stormed out of police vehicles. It was also disguised in civilian attire, beating up protesters and dragging them along the ground. In the streets of downtown Cairo, security forces undressed and sexually assaulted female protesters. It was a great shock. We thought this was the worst the beast could do to us. We thought this offense was enough to destroy the beast. These presumptions reflect the naivety and arrogance of our youth, and are telling of its pure heart and true emotions. Repelled by the consequent feverishly confrontational rhetoric, I withdrew from all battles with the beast.
I had encountered the same naivety five years earlier. I was a high school student in 2000 when I joined a students’ protest in solidarity with the Second Intifada. The former Israeli prime minister and war criminal, Ariel Sharon, had visited Al-Aqsa Mosque and sparked the Palestinian uprising. Israeli forces then assassinated a 12-year-old, Mohamed al-Durrah, while he was in his father’s arms. Our schoolteachers encouraged us to protest, but did not demonstrate themselves. They encouraged us to walk in small angry groups, chanting for the liberty of Palestine, vowing never to forget retribution for Durrah. The security forces then allowed us to demonstrate in bigger groups outside the schools gates, roaming the streets of Mansoura, where I spent my teenage years. The children and students surrounding me were in ecstasy because they had obtained the right to scream and found freedom in the streets for the first time. And when groups of marching students encountered each other they embraced theatrically. Schools in Mansoura, as across the country, are segregated by gender. It was amazing to watch boys and girls mingling in these protests, as opposed to the usual scene of male students waiting outside of girls’ schools to harass them, pick them up, or engage them in emotional adventures. But the crowds, screaming, over-excitement and the egoism of those miserable souls dying to lead the chants, left me mentally disassociated, despite being a part of it all.
I would learn five years later, upon my graduation from university, how Hosni Mubarak’s regime not only allowed the anti-Israel protests but supported and even instigated them. Mubarak wanted the cameras to film the angry crowds as they burned the Israeli flag in order to point at the image, address the gods in Oslo’s mountains and Washington’s valleys and say, “I am here to control these beasts, so that they don’t burn down everything.” When the anti-Mubarak protests later took to the streets, security forces encircled them. Because they had not become beasts yet, Mubarak’s regime made sure they did by undressing female protesters and sexually assaulting young protesters. Instead of becoming beasts, however, they chose defeat and sought revenge through victimhood.
I became jaded by the ridiculousness of the charades we are summoned to participate in, such as elections. This was in addition to the calls for limiting religious and sexual freedoms in the name of religion, and other travesties that conjure up the idea of the nation. They instruct you on the importance of loving the nation and tell you how to do so. These directions did not suit me or various other people I met online. We thus preferred to create our own virtual reality, outside authorities’ control. We created a space that contrasted with the tedious moral principles of our fathers. Egypt was passing through great times. Everyone on television was talking about a democratic transformation. In the authority’s blind spot, we made small venues to hold parties and play music prohibited from broadcast radio and television (both public and private), because it doesn’t contain the usual tacky love song lyrics. In one of these parties, Alaa Abd El Fattah suggested we create a parody of the president’s website, and that I compose its comic content. These were the kinds of games we played. We used delve to into our virtual bubbles and make fun of the naked king, and how his entourage and slaves praised his garments.
I met my first wife on an online forum for the fans of [popular Egyptian singer] Mohamed Mounir. We were teenagers, barely 18 years old. Together we spent an often turbulent 10 years of love, marriage and divorce, a complete cycle of life. Others met on the forums and blogs of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Revolutionary Socialists, the “foot fetish club,” the “Bin Laden warriors” or the “‘Fatakat housewives’” forum. In contrast to the [political stagnation] that manifested in catting about Mubarak’s unfading pitch-black hair dye, the internet was a new home for those holding similar views to get together. The faint humming of these groups’ discussions gradually became audible. With the help of hearing aids, the old guards began to describe that humming as the voice of youth. They labeled young people as aliens to society, and then agents of the West and immorality. In any case, they did not take young people seriously or understand them.
“The old corpses should make way for the new corpses.”
The old zombies were taking up all the seats. The zombie general, the zombie sheikh, the zombie president, the zombie businessman, the zombie ruling party, the zombie opposition, the moderate Islamist zombie, and the radical Islamist zombie. And all they offered the youth was to be zombies and let go of their idealistic dreams and ethics. We were forced to mingle with these zombies. We were forced to converse with them, coax them, sometimes praise them, in order to protect ourselves against their evil. “With cold hands, we got into their midst; we looked but could not see,” is how poet Youssef Rakha described the situation years later in his great poem, On Sleeping with Reality. When we opposed them or refused to consume their archaic understanding of the nation and religion, we were faced with torture, marginalization and siege.
“Live like your parents have lived,” said the zombies. In his movie The Mummy (1969), late Egyptian filmmaker Shady Abdel Salam tells us that our parents lived as scavengers. Girls walk in the streets with their shoulders curved forward and heads looking down with a desire not to be noticed. They don’t look left or right, often getting catcalled and harassed in silence. When they decided to stand up against mass sexual assault in the heart of the city, zombies accused girls and women of attracting criminal harassers and arousing them.
Demonstrators first took to the streets to protest police brutality and torture. They were accused of insulting the police. Protests kept growing in size and magnitude, eventually calling for the removal of the zombies’ leader (who taught his disciples his hair-dying technique). The zombies then congregated to address the youth. “Consider him your father,” they said, in reference to their leader.
Common traits of young people include passion and emotional vulnerability. As much as passion fueled the revolution, gushing blood in the veins of the agitated masses, it also prompted mercy and pity. It was precisely this passion that transformed the revolution into a quest to seek retribution for the martyrs, and prevent the children from killing their zombie fathers.
In many of Pauline Beugnies’ images in her photo book Génération Tahrir, we can see heated discussions between girls and mothers, between the young and the old. What’s not audible, however, is the sound of the screams, debates and opposing views. But the photos do make clear to us the magnitude of the authority the zombie fathers possess and the immense pressure young people are under.
I knew many young men and women who took to the streets, burning car tires and occupying the frontlines in the battle against the criminal elements of the police force. But the moment their phones rang, they would quickly escape to a quiet spot to answer their mothers’ calls. “I’m fine and far away from the clashes,” they would say. They must have thought rebellion could exist in a parallel reality away from familial life. I have also known activists who work on LGBT rights and are brave enough to advocate this issue in a [conservative] society like Egypt’s. They defend these rights in a court of law, in front of the police, and so on, yet cannot muster the courage to announce this to their parents. My female friends who gave officers the finger as they were being shot with the police’s rubber bullets used to weep in the face of parental and societal pressures. They are pressured to assume a single path in life, a future that includes nothing but marriage and bearing children in a cycle of reproducing more zombies.
This cowardliness and hesitancy led young people to always try to find a middle ground, only to eventually be deprived of everything by their fathers. They cheered for moderate Islamists, as the Brotherhood youth claimed that Islam is an identity and a moderate religion compatible with democracy. The Brotherhood youth claimed there was no place for secularism in our national identity. Then the Islamist zombies announced that there was no difference between Islamic State militants and us. They called those militants “mujahidin” and pledged to send their young people to fight on their side in Syria. When young democrats cheered for the civilian coalition led by a military general, they justified this. “Look at Sisi’s eyes,” they said. “They radiate warmth and love; he will save this nation and build a secular state.” The general responded by prohibiting speech and jailing everyone. Others were killed in public squares and football stadiums.
The Gulf sheikhs, the agents of the Western gods in the region, backed up the general. Along with the zombies and the general, they opted to deprive young people of all spaces, even virtual reality. Internet surveillance systems were put in place and a single tweet could put its writer behind bars. They invested millions in the internet, turning it into a mega shopping mall, controlling its content through social media companies that decide what’s trending. If a single story surfaces on a new torture case inside an Egyptian prison, it is quickly buried under piles of entries and clicks on the new shapes of Kim Kardashian’s butt.
A few weeks ago, I began sensing a faint, dull pain in my left testicle. The doctor told me I’m suffering from a case of varicocele in my testicles. He advised me not to stay standing for long periods of time, cut back on sexual intercourse and refrain from prolonged erections. When I asked him about the cause, he simply said, without taking his eyes off his newpapers: “Most probably it is genetics and age.”
No more prolonged erections for our generation; we are dispersed all over the world. Some are in jail, some are exiled and some are willing to be drawn to the Mediterranean’s European shores. Others aim for an exit from hell to God’s promised heaven through a path of beheadings. Those who have stayed have secured a place among the zombies. They appear on television as youth representatives, take selfies with the zombie general and sheikhs, and compete over the crumbs Gulf amirs and sheikhs often throw at them.
Now it is time for documentation, archiving and preservation before we depart with the past and our youth. Let’s bid farewell to our sorrows and ghosts. Let’s search within for a new path and revolution. The greatest danger lies in giving into nostalgia, to the old ideas and principles, and to assume there is a golden moment in the past that should be retrieved. The greatest danger is in revering the picture. Any form of reverence — for the revolution or the martyrs or higher ideologies — is enough to turn you into a zombie without even noticing it.
This essay was first published in French as an introduction to the book Génération Tahrir, for which photographer Pauline Beugnies followed the stories of various artists and politicians during the 25 January revolution in 2011
I first saw the beast in 2005, in downtown Cairo, in front of the Journalists Syndicate steps. Young men and women gathered and chanted “kifaya” (enough). The beast, dressed in military uniform, stormed out of police vehicles. It was also disguised in civilian attire, beating up protesters and dragging them along the ground. In the streets of downtown Cairo, security forces undressed and sexually assaulted female protesters. It was a great shock. We thought this was the worst the beast could do to us. We thought this offense was enough to destroy the beast. These presumptions reflect the naivety and arrogance of our youth, and are telling of its pure heart and true emotions. Repelled by the consequent feverishly confrontational rhetoric, I withdrew from all battles with the beast.
I had encountered the same naivety five years earlier. I was a high school student in 2000 when I joined a students’ protest in solidarity with the Second Intifada. The former Israeli prime minister and war criminal, Ariel Sharon, had visited Al-Aqsa Mosque and sparked the Palestinian uprising. Israeli forces then assassinated a 12-year-old, Mohamed al-Durrah, while he was in his father’s arms. Our schoolteachers encouraged us to protest, but did not demonstrate themselves. They encouraged us to walk in small angry groups, chanting for the liberty of Palestine, vowing never to forget retribution for Durrah. The security forces then allowed us to demonstrate in bigger groups outside the schools gates, roaming the streets of Mansoura, where I spent my teenage years. The children and students surrounding me were in ecstasy because they had obtained the right to scream and found freedom in the streets for the first time. And when groups of marching students encountered each other they embraced theatrically. Schools in Mansoura, as across the country, are segregated by gender. It was amazing to watch boys and girls mingling in these protests, as opposed to the usual scene of male students waiting outside of girls’ schools to harass them, pick them up, or engage them in emotional adventures. But the crowds, screaming, over-excitement and the egoism of those miserable souls dying to lead the chants, left me mentally disassociated, despite being a part of it all.
I would learn five years later, upon my graduation from university, how Hosni Mubarak’s regime not only allowed the anti-Israel protests but supported and even instigated them. Mubarak wanted the cameras to film the angry crowds as they burned the Israeli flag in order to point at the image, address the gods in Oslo’s mountains and Washington’s valleys and say, “I am here to control these beasts, so that they don’t burn down everything.” When the anti-Mubarak protests later took to the streets, security forces encircled them. Because they had not become beasts yet, Mubarak’s regime made sure they did by undressing female protesters and sexually assaulting young protesters. Instead of becoming beasts, however, they chose defeat and sought revenge through victimhood.
I became jaded by the ridiculousness of the charades we are summoned to participate in, such as elections. This was in addition to the calls for limiting religious and sexual freedoms in the name of religion, and other travesties that conjure up the idea of the nation. They instruct you on the importance of loving the nation and tell you how to do so. These directions did not suit me or various other people I met online. We thus preferred to create our own virtual reality, outside authorities’ control. We created a space that contrasted with the tedious moral principles of our fathers. Egypt was passing through great times. Everyone on television was talking about a democratic transformation. In the authority’s blind spot, we made small venues to hold parties and play music prohibited from broadcast radio and television (both public and private), because it doesn’t contain the usual tacky love song lyrics. In one of these parties, Alaa Abd El Fattah suggested we create a parody of the president’s website, and that I compose its comic content. These were the kinds of games we played. We used delve to into our virtual bubbles and make fun of the naked king, and how his entourage and slaves praised his garments.
I met my first wife on an online forum for the fans of [popular Egyptian singer] Mohamed Mounir. We were teenagers, barely 18 years old. Together we spent an often turbulent 10 years of love, marriage and divorce, a complete cycle of life. Others met on the forums and blogs of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Revolutionary Socialists, the “foot fetish club,” the “Bin Laden warriors” or the “‘Fatakat housewives’” forum. In contrast to the [political stagnation] that manifested in catting about Mubarak’s unfading pitch-black hair dye, the internet was a new home for those holding similar views to get together. The faint humming of these groups’ discussions gradually became audible. With the help of hearing aids, the old guards began to describe that humming as the voice of youth. They labeled young people as aliens to society, and then agents of the West and immorality. In any case, they did not take young people seriously or understand them.
“The old corpses should make way for the new corpses.”
The old zombies were taking up all the seats. The zombie general, the zombie sheikh, the zombie president, the zombie businessman, the zombie ruling party, the zombie opposition, the moderate Islamist zombie, and the radical Islamist zombie. And all they offered the youth was to be zombies and let go of their idealistic dreams and ethics. We were forced to mingle with these zombies. We were forced to converse with them, coax them, sometimes praise them, in order to protect ourselves against their evil. “With cold hands, we got into their midst; we looked but could not see,” is how poet Youssef Rakha described the situation years later in his great poem, On Sleeping with Reality. When we opposed them or refused to consume their archaic understanding of the nation and religion, we were faced with torture, marginalization and siege.
“Live like your parents have lived,” said the zombies. In his movie The Mummy (1969), late Egyptian filmmaker Shady Abdel Salam tells us that our parents lived as scavengers. Girls walk in the streets with their shoulders curved forward and heads looking down with a desire not to be noticed. They don’t look left or right, often getting catcalled and harassed in silence. When they decided to stand up against mass sexual assault in the heart of the city, zombies accused girls and women of attracting criminal harassers and arousing them.
Demonstrators first took to the streets to protest police brutality and torture. They were accused of insulting the police. Protests kept growing in size and magnitude, eventually calling for the removal of the zombies’ leader (who taught his disciples his hair-dying technique). The zombies then congregated to address the youth. “Consider him your father,” they said, in reference to their leader.
Common traits of young people include passion and emotional vulnerability. As much as passion fueled the revolution, gushing blood in the veins of the agitated masses, it also prompted mercy and pity. It was precisely this passion that transformed the revolution into a quest to seek retribution for the martyrs, and prevent the children from killing their zombie fathers.
In many of Pauline Beugnies’ images in her photo book Génération Tahrir, we can see heated discussions between girls and mothers, between the young and the old. What’s not audible, however, is the sound of the screams, debates and opposing views. But the photos do make clear to us the magnitude of the authority the zombie fathers possess and the immense pressure young people are under.
I knew many young men and women who took to the streets, burning car tires and occupying the frontlines in the battle against the criminal elements of the police force. But the moment their phones rang, they would quickly escape to a quiet spot to answer their mothers’ calls. “I’m fine and far away from the clashes,” they would say. They must have thought rebellion could exist in a parallel reality away from familial life. I have also known activists who work on LGBT rights and are brave enough to advocate this issue in a [conservative] society like Egypt’s. They defend these rights in a court of law, in front of the police, and so on, yet cannot muster the courage to announce this to their parents. My female friends who gave officers the finger as they were being shot with the police’s rubber bullets used to weep in the face of parental and societal pressures. They are pressured to assume a single path in life, a future that includes nothing but marriage and bearing children in a cycle of reproducing more zombies.
This cowardliness and hesitancy led young people to always try to find a middle ground, only to eventually be deprived of everything by their fathers. They cheered for moderate Islamists, as the Brotherhood youth claimed that Islam is an identity and a moderate religion compatible with democracy. The Brotherhood youth claimed there was no place for secularism in our national identity. Then the Islamist zombies announced that there was no difference between Islamic State militants and us. They called those militants “mujahidin” and pledged to send their young people to fight on their side in Syria. When young democrats cheered for the civilian coalition led by a military general, they justified this. “Look at Sisi’s eyes,” they said. “They radiate warmth and love; he will save this nation and build a secular state.” The general responded by prohibiting speech and jailing everyone. Others were killed in public squares and football stadiums.
The Gulf sheikhs, the agents of the Western gods in the region, backed up the general. Along with the zombies and the general, they opted to deprive young people of all spaces, even virtual reality. Internet surveillance systems were put in place and a single tweet could put its writer behind bars. They invested millions in the internet, turning it into a mega shopping mall, controlling its content through social media companies that decide what’s trending. If a single story surfaces on a new torture case inside an Egyptian prison, it is quickly buried under piles of entries and clicks on the new shapes of Kim Kardashian’s butt.
A few weeks ago, I began sensing a faint, dull pain in my left testicle. The doctor told me I’m suffering from a case of varicocele in my testicles. He advised me not to stay standing for long periods of time, cut back on sexual intercourse and refrain from prolonged erections. When I asked him about the cause, he simply said, without taking his eyes off his newpapers: “Most probably it is genetics and age.”
No more prolonged erections for our generation; we are dispersed all over the world. Some are in jail, some are exiled and some are willing to be drawn to the Mediterranean’s European shores. Others aim for an exit from hell to God’s promised heaven through a path of beheadings. Those who have stayed have secured a place among the zombies. They appear on television as youth representatives, take selfies with the zombie general and sheikhs, and compete over the crumbs Gulf amirs and sheikhs often throw at them.
Now it is time for documentation, archiving and preservation before we depart with the past and our youth. Let’s bid farewell to our sorrows and ghosts. Let’s search within for a new path and revolution. The greatest danger lies in giving into nostalgia, to the old ideas and principles, and to assume there is a golden moment in the past that should be retrieved. The greatest danger is in revering the picture. Any form of reverence — for the revolution or the martyrs or higher ideologies — is enough to turn you into a zombie without even noticing it.
This essay was first published in French as an introduction to the book Génération Tahrir, for which photographer Pauline Beugnies followed the stories of various artists and politicians during the 25 January revolution in 2011
January 1, 2017
Egypt: Laughter in the Dark -by Zadie Smith
I first heard the name Ahmed Naji at a PEN dinner last spring. I looked up from my dessert to a large projection of a young Egyptian man, rather handsome, slightly louche-looking, with a Burt Reynolds moustache, wearing a Nehru shirt in a dandyish print and the half smile of someone both amusing and easily amused. I learned that he was just thirty and had written a novel called Using Life for which he is currently serving a two-year prison sentence. I thought: good title. A facile thought to have at such a moment but it’s what came to mind. I liked the echo of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual—the coolness of that—and thought I recognized, in Naji’s author photo, something antic and wild, not unlike what you see when you look at pictures of Perec. You could call it judging a book by its cover: I’d rather think of it as the readerly premonition that this book might please me. If he had written a book called Peacocks in Moonlight and posed for one of these author portraits where the writer’s head is resting on his own closed fist, I would have been equally shocked and saddened to hear he was in prison, but perhaps not as keen to read it.
As I was having these unserious thoughts the contents of the novel were being roughly outlined for us all from the stage. It sounded intriguing: a kind of hybrid, with certain chapters illustrated as in a graphic novel, and with a comic plot concerning a dystopian Cairo, although it was in fact the novel’s sexual content that had landed its author in jail. Though the novel had been approved by the Egyptian censorship board, a sixty-five-year-old “concerned citizen,” upon reading an excerpt in the literary weekly Akhbar al-Adab, had felt so offended by it that he made a complaint to the local judiciary, who then charged Naji and the editor of the weekly with the crime of “infringing public decency.” (The editor is not serving a jail sentence but had to pay a fine.) There was, to me, something monstrous but also darkly comic about this vision of a reader who could not only dislike your prose but imprison you for it, although of course at the dinner the emphasis was necessarily on the monstrous rather then the ludicrous. But when I got home that night I found an online interview with Naji in which the absurdity of his situation was not at all lost on him:
I really enjoyed the dramatic statement of that plaintiff reader. He told the prosecution that he buys the journal regularly for his daughters, but that one time, his wife walked into the room showing him my published chapter and ridiculing him for bringing such writing into their home. He said his “heartbeat fluctuated and blood pressure dropped” while reading the chapter.
Naji seemed bleakly amused, too, by the months of semantic debate that had led to his prosecution, in which the judges sophistically tried to separate fiction from a non-fiction “essay,” determining finally that this extract was in fact the latter, and so subject to prosecution as a kind of personal revelation:
According to their investigations and official documents, my fiction registers as a confession to having had sex with Mrs. Milaqa (one of the characters in my novel), from kissing her knees all the way to taking off the condom. They also object to my use of words such as “pussy, cock, licking, sucking” and the scenes of hashish smoking. Ironically, this chapter speaks of the happy days of Cairo, as opposed to the days of loss and siege dominant in the remaining chapters. This specific chapter is an attempt to describe what a happy day would look like for a young man in Cairo, but perhaps a happy life feels too provoking for the public prosecutor!
Which sounded even more intriguing. A few days later I’d managed to contact Naji’s friend and sometime translator Mona Kareem, who sent me a PDF of Using Life (itself translated by Ben Koerber) to read on my Kindle. It opened with a beautiful line of Lucretius, and I felt immediately justified in my superficial sense of kinship: “Forever is one thing born from another; life is given to none to own, but to all to use.” And as I read on, the novel’s title took on a different resonance again, for here was a writer not content to use only one or two elements of life, no, here was a guy who wanted to use all of it:
In September, as the city’s residents were just beginning to recover from the most traumatic summer of their lives, there came a series of tremors and earthquakes that would be known as “The Great Quake.” It resulted in the destruction of nearly half the city. The there was an eruption of sinkholes that swallowed entire streets, and distorted the flow of the Nile…The sinkholes did not spare even the pyramids, and nothing could be done for the Great Pyramid itself, which was reduced to a simple pile of rubble. All that was left of our great heritage—our civilization, our architecture, our poetry and prose—would soon meet a fate even worse than that of the pyramids. Everything collapsed into the earth or was buried under oceans of sand.
So here was the epic mode—the fantastical analogy for a present political misery—but right up next to it, unexpectedly, was the intimate, the bathetic, the comic:
[She] went back to rolling the joint, twisting one end into a little hat. She took out her lighter and set the little hat on fire. Watching the slow, dark burn gave me a tingle on my cock, which I put out with a scratch.
Ahmed Naji
PEN America
Ahmed Naji
The girl in question is Mona May and she’s impossible. The narrator is a young man in a failing state but he is also just a kid in love with a (slightly older) woman who happens to drive him up the wall: “I looked at my face in the mirror, and asked myself a serious question: what am I doing here? If I could put up with her arrogance, her stupidity, her hallucinations, her mid-life crisis…what should I expect in return? At the very least, if I loved her, was still obsessed with her, then there was no reason for me to be here, since my presence clearly causes some kind of disturbance in her world.” Angst! Romance! Sex! Dicks! And illustrations, though these I could not see in the PDF, and had to content myself instead with the tantalizing captions. (“The leftover particles of shit that stuck to our bodies resulted in certain deformities. Marital relations suffered, and many died.”) Using Life is a riotous novel about a failing state, a corrupt city, a hypocritical authority, but it is also about tequila shots and getting laid and smoking weed with your infuriating girlfriend and debating whether rock music died in the Seventies and if Quentin Tarantino is a genius or a fraud. It’s a young man’s book. A young man whose youth is colliding with a dark moment in history.
In an attempt to draw more attention to Naji’s cause, Mona recently translated three very short, flash-fiction type stories for PEN’s website. They published one, “The Plant,” which begins like this:
I will not come through the door or the window,
but as a plant you cannot notice with your naked eye.
I will grow day after day, to the sound of your singing and the rhythm of your breath at night. A small plant you will not notice at first, growing beneath your bed.
From door to bed, to bathroom to closet, standing or sitting against the mirror. Through all these acts, and to the sound of your humming, I will grow. A small green plant. With grand slim leaves sneaking out from beneath your bed.
I read this voice first as the spirit of underground resistance, then as the essence of pervasive dictatorship, and then back to resistance once more. The second story, unpublished, was called “Ambulance” and began like so: “She was sucking my dick when suddenly she stopped to ask if I had given grandmother her medicine.” The last, also unpublished, was called “Normal,” and it opened this way: “One time as I was heading back to Sixth of October city, a prostitute showed up on the way dressed in the official uniform, a black cloak without a headscarf, and instead she had bangs and black hair falling over her shoulders. She was carrying a huge neon bag.”
Mona seemed a little perplexed that PEN had chosen only one of these shorts, but I could understand it. An imprisoned writer is a very serious thing indeed and should not be treated lightly, so it puts an activist in a certain sort of bind when the writer in question turns out to be lightness itself. Naji’s prose explicitly confronts what happens when one’s fundamentally unserious, oversexed youth dovetails with an authoritarian, utterly self-serious regime that is in the process of tearing itself apart. It’s very bad historical luck—of the kind I’ve never suffered. It’s monstrous. It’s ludicrous.
But the fact that the punishment does not fit the crime—that prison is, at this moment in Cairo, the absurd response to the word “pussy”—is exactly what shouldn’t be elided. In another historical moment, or so it occurs to me, young Ahmed would be at that PEN dinner, sitting right next to me, having come over from Cairo for a quick jaunt to see writer friends in Bed-Stuy, and he’d be a bit bored by the solemn speeches, sneaking out the back of the museum to smoke a joint perhaps, and then returning to his seat in high humor just in time to watch a literary giant whom he didn’t really respect come up to the stage to receive an award. That, anyway, is the spirit I detect in his novel: perverse and brilliant, full of youth, energy, light! Some writers, in the face of state oppression, will write like Solzhenitsyn. Others, like Naji, find their kindred spirits in the likes of Nabokov and Milan Kundera, writers who maintained their instinct for unbearable lightness and pleasure, for sex and romance, for perversity and delight, in the face of so much po-faced violent philistinism.
“I think I understand now,” writes Naji, in Using Life, “that the bullshit inside of us is nothing but a reflection of the bullshit outside. Or maybe it’s the other way round. In either case, the outside bullshit eventually seeps inside, and settles into the depths of our souls.” But on the evidence of his own writing the bullshit has not yet settled in Naji, not even in his jail cell. He is part of a great creative renaissance in Cairo, of young novelists and poets, graphic novelists, and—perhaps most visibly—graffiti artists, who have turned the city’s ever increasing walls into a staging site for political protest and artistic expression. Since 2014, President Sisi has cracked down on this community, with new restrictions on the press and multiplying arrests of artists and writers, and yet the Egyptian constitution guarantees both artistic freedom and freedom of expression. Naji has been prosecuted instead on Article 178 of the Penal Code, which criminalizes “content that violates public morals.”
An attempt to appeal was rejected in February. Naji’s last appeal is on December 4. If you read this and feel so moved, tweet #FreeNaji and any other social media action that occurs to you. Hundreds of Egyptian artists and intellectuals have signed a petition in support of Naji but there are also loud voices who feel that his example should not be used in a “freedom of literature” argument because they see his writing as not really literature, as fundamentally unserious. Using Life is certainly comic, sexual, wild—the work of an outrageous young man. We should defend his freedom to be so. “Falling in love in Cairo,” I learn, from his novel, “You have to prepare for the worst. You just can’t walk over to her and say, ‘Mona May, I’ve got the jones for you.’ Words like these could get a man hurt.” Over here, in New York, words won’t get you into too much trouble—not yet, anyway. What would we dare to write if they did?
Editor’s note: Ahmed Naji was released from prison on December 22, after Egypt’s highest appeals court temporarily suspended his sentence; a hearing will be held on January 1 to determine whether he will face another trial or be sent back to prison.
Ahmed Naji’s novel Using Life, in an English translation by Ben Koerber, will be published by The Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at The University of Texas at Austin next year.
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/...
As I was having these unserious thoughts the contents of the novel were being roughly outlined for us all from the stage. It sounded intriguing: a kind of hybrid, with certain chapters illustrated as in a graphic novel, and with a comic plot concerning a dystopian Cairo, although it was in fact the novel’s sexual content that had landed its author in jail. Though the novel had been approved by the Egyptian censorship board, a sixty-five-year-old “concerned citizen,” upon reading an excerpt in the literary weekly Akhbar al-Adab, had felt so offended by it that he made a complaint to the local judiciary, who then charged Naji and the editor of the weekly with the crime of “infringing public decency.” (The editor is not serving a jail sentence but had to pay a fine.) There was, to me, something monstrous but also darkly comic about this vision of a reader who could not only dislike your prose but imprison you for it, although of course at the dinner the emphasis was necessarily on the monstrous rather then the ludicrous. But when I got home that night I found an online interview with Naji in which the absurdity of his situation was not at all lost on him:
I really enjoyed the dramatic statement of that plaintiff reader. He told the prosecution that he buys the journal regularly for his daughters, but that one time, his wife walked into the room showing him my published chapter and ridiculing him for bringing such writing into their home. He said his “heartbeat fluctuated and blood pressure dropped” while reading the chapter.
Naji seemed bleakly amused, too, by the months of semantic debate that had led to his prosecution, in which the judges sophistically tried to separate fiction from a non-fiction “essay,” determining finally that this extract was in fact the latter, and so subject to prosecution as a kind of personal revelation:
According to their investigations and official documents, my fiction registers as a confession to having had sex with Mrs. Milaqa (one of the characters in my novel), from kissing her knees all the way to taking off the condom. They also object to my use of words such as “pussy, cock, licking, sucking” and the scenes of hashish smoking. Ironically, this chapter speaks of the happy days of Cairo, as opposed to the days of loss and siege dominant in the remaining chapters. This specific chapter is an attempt to describe what a happy day would look like for a young man in Cairo, but perhaps a happy life feels too provoking for the public prosecutor!
Which sounded even more intriguing. A few days later I’d managed to contact Naji’s friend and sometime translator Mona Kareem, who sent me a PDF of Using Life (itself translated by Ben Koerber) to read on my Kindle. It opened with a beautiful line of Lucretius, and I felt immediately justified in my superficial sense of kinship: “Forever is one thing born from another; life is given to none to own, but to all to use.” And as I read on, the novel’s title took on a different resonance again, for here was a writer not content to use only one or two elements of life, no, here was a guy who wanted to use all of it:
In September, as the city’s residents were just beginning to recover from the most traumatic summer of their lives, there came a series of tremors and earthquakes that would be known as “The Great Quake.” It resulted in the destruction of nearly half the city. The there was an eruption of sinkholes that swallowed entire streets, and distorted the flow of the Nile…The sinkholes did not spare even the pyramids, and nothing could be done for the Great Pyramid itself, which was reduced to a simple pile of rubble. All that was left of our great heritage—our civilization, our architecture, our poetry and prose—would soon meet a fate even worse than that of the pyramids. Everything collapsed into the earth or was buried under oceans of sand.
So here was the epic mode—the fantastical analogy for a present political misery—but right up next to it, unexpectedly, was the intimate, the bathetic, the comic:
[She] went back to rolling the joint, twisting one end into a little hat. She took out her lighter and set the little hat on fire. Watching the slow, dark burn gave me a tingle on my cock, which I put out with a scratch.
Ahmed Naji
PEN America
Ahmed Naji
The girl in question is Mona May and she’s impossible. The narrator is a young man in a failing state but he is also just a kid in love with a (slightly older) woman who happens to drive him up the wall: “I looked at my face in the mirror, and asked myself a serious question: what am I doing here? If I could put up with her arrogance, her stupidity, her hallucinations, her mid-life crisis…what should I expect in return? At the very least, if I loved her, was still obsessed with her, then there was no reason for me to be here, since my presence clearly causes some kind of disturbance in her world.” Angst! Romance! Sex! Dicks! And illustrations, though these I could not see in the PDF, and had to content myself instead with the tantalizing captions. (“The leftover particles of shit that stuck to our bodies resulted in certain deformities. Marital relations suffered, and many died.”) Using Life is a riotous novel about a failing state, a corrupt city, a hypocritical authority, but it is also about tequila shots and getting laid and smoking weed with your infuriating girlfriend and debating whether rock music died in the Seventies and if Quentin Tarantino is a genius or a fraud. It’s a young man’s book. A young man whose youth is colliding with a dark moment in history.
In an attempt to draw more attention to Naji’s cause, Mona recently translated three very short, flash-fiction type stories for PEN’s website. They published one, “The Plant,” which begins like this:
I will not come through the door or the window,
but as a plant you cannot notice with your naked eye.
I will grow day after day, to the sound of your singing and the rhythm of your breath at night. A small plant you will not notice at first, growing beneath your bed.
From door to bed, to bathroom to closet, standing or sitting against the mirror. Through all these acts, and to the sound of your humming, I will grow. A small green plant. With grand slim leaves sneaking out from beneath your bed.
I read this voice first as the spirit of underground resistance, then as the essence of pervasive dictatorship, and then back to resistance once more. The second story, unpublished, was called “Ambulance” and began like so: “She was sucking my dick when suddenly she stopped to ask if I had given grandmother her medicine.” The last, also unpublished, was called “Normal,” and it opened this way: “One time as I was heading back to Sixth of October city, a prostitute showed up on the way dressed in the official uniform, a black cloak without a headscarf, and instead she had bangs and black hair falling over her shoulders. She was carrying a huge neon bag.”
Mona seemed a little perplexed that PEN had chosen only one of these shorts, but I could understand it. An imprisoned writer is a very serious thing indeed and should not be treated lightly, so it puts an activist in a certain sort of bind when the writer in question turns out to be lightness itself. Naji’s prose explicitly confronts what happens when one’s fundamentally unserious, oversexed youth dovetails with an authoritarian, utterly self-serious regime that is in the process of tearing itself apart. It’s very bad historical luck—of the kind I’ve never suffered. It’s monstrous. It’s ludicrous.
But the fact that the punishment does not fit the crime—that prison is, at this moment in Cairo, the absurd response to the word “pussy”—is exactly what shouldn’t be elided. In another historical moment, or so it occurs to me, young Ahmed would be at that PEN dinner, sitting right next to me, having come over from Cairo for a quick jaunt to see writer friends in Bed-Stuy, and he’d be a bit bored by the solemn speeches, sneaking out the back of the museum to smoke a joint perhaps, and then returning to his seat in high humor just in time to watch a literary giant whom he didn’t really respect come up to the stage to receive an award. That, anyway, is the spirit I detect in his novel: perverse and brilliant, full of youth, energy, light! Some writers, in the face of state oppression, will write like Solzhenitsyn. Others, like Naji, find their kindred spirits in the likes of Nabokov and Milan Kundera, writers who maintained their instinct for unbearable lightness and pleasure, for sex and romance, for perversity and delight, in the face of so much po-faced violent philistinism.
“I think I understand now,” writes Naji, in Using Life, “that the bullshit inside of us is nothing but a reflection of the bullshit outside. Or maybe it’s the other way round. In either case, the outside bullshit eventually seeps inside, and settles into the depths of our souls.” But on the evidence of his own writing the bullshit has not yet settled in Naji, not even in his jail cell. He is part of a great creative renaissance in Cairo, of young novelists and poets, graphic novelists, and—perhaps most visibly—graffiti artists, who have turned the city’s ever increasing walls into a staging site for political protest and artistic expression. Since 2014, President Sisi has cracked down on this community, with new restrictions on the press and multiplying arrests of artists and writers, and yet the Egyptian constitution guarantees both artistic freedom and freedom of expression. Naji has been prosecuted instead on Article 178 of the Penal Code, which criminalizes “content that violates public morals.”
An attempt to appeal was rejected in February. Naji’s last appeal is on December 4. If you read this and feel so moved, tweet #FreeNaji and any other social media action that occurs to you. Hundreds of Egyptian artists and intellectuals have signed a petition in support of Naji but there are also loud voices who feel that his example should not be used in a “freedom of literature” argument because they see his writing as not really literature, as fundamentally unserious. Using Life is certainly comic, sexual, wild—the work of an outrageous young man. We should defend his freedom to be so. “Falling in love in Cairo,” I learn, from his novel, “You have to prepare for the worst. You just can’t walk over to her and say, ‘Mona May, I’ve got the jones for you.’ Words like these could get a man hurt.” Over here, in New York, words won’t get you into too much trouble—not yet, anyway. What would we dare to write if they did?
Editor’s note: Ahmed Naji was released from prison on December 22, after Egypt’s highest appeals court temporarily suspended his sentence; a hearing will be held on January 1 to determine whether he will face another trial or be sent back to prison.
Ahmed Naji’s novel Using Life, in an English translation by Ben Koerber, will be published by The Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at The University of Texas at Austin next year.
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/...
February 13, 2016
وائل العشري يكتب عن ذباب القانون وذباب الأدب
“يبدو أن القانون كقانون ليس له أبداً أن تصدر عنه أي قصة.”
جاك ديريدا، أمام القانون
يدخل أحمد ناجي أحمد حجازي، الذات القانونية، بصحبة أحمد ناجي، الكاتب، وبسام، الراوي الرئيسي لـ “استخدام الحياة”، والرواية أيضاً (تحديداً فصل واحد منها)، إلى متاهة القانون.
لقد خدش، أو خدشوا جميعاً، “الحياء العام”، هكذا يخبرنا من يمثّل القانون.
“سخر . . . أنامله،” تقول النيابة في قرار إحالته إلى المحاكمة “لنشر مادة كتابية نفث فيها شهوة فانية ولذة زائلة وأجر عقله وقلمه لتوجه خبيث حمل انتهاكاً لحرمة الآداب العامة وحسن الأخلاق والأغراء بالعهر خروجاً على عاطفة الحياء وهدماً للمثل المصطلح عليها فولدت [مَن؟ المادة الكتابية؟] سفاحاً مشاهد صورت اجتماع الجنسين جهرة وما لبث ينشر سموم قلمه برواية أو مقال في صفراء باليه حتى وقعت تحت يد القاصى قبل الدانى والقاصر قبل البالغ فأضحى كالذباب لا يرى إلا القاذورات والنجاسات فيسلط عليها الأضواء والكاميرات حتى عمت الفوضى وانتشرت النار في الهشيم وجاءت تحريات جهة البحث كخرزات نظم ينحدرن توافقاً على قيام المتهم بكتابة المقال وأحتوائه على الفاظ خادشة للحياء”
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لا يخبرنا قرار الإحالة بما فعل أحمد ناجي أحمد حجازي على وجه التحديد. إنه يشير فقط وعلينا أن نفهم. علينا أن نقطع طريقنا من مجاز إلى آخر، من محسن بديعي إلى آخر، من خطأ لغوي لآخر (كاتب هذا المقال ليس ضد الأخطاء بشكل خاص، لكن ربما من المهم أن نلاحظها حين تأتي من القانون وبيروقراطيته) حتى النهاية. علينا، ربما، أن يملأنا الإعجاب أيضاً بهذه اللغة “الجميلة” التي تُدين شخصاً تحول إلى ذبابة.
يبدو قرار الإحالة مثل تدريب مدرسي متحمس على كتابة مقال. وكما يحدث في الحالات الشبيهة، يجد الكاتب لذة لا تفنى، وسعادة لا تزول من مخزون لا نهائي، معدّ سلفاً، من قائمة مجازات يُعاد تدويرها باستمرار، مرة بعد مرة بعد مرة، من موضوع تعبير إلى آخر، ولهذا فهي مضمونة التأثير. عليها خاتم ما، ربما للدولة، أو لمؤسساتها التعليمية، أو ربما هو ختم المجازات العامة. أجازته سلطة ما، وضمنت تأثيراً مُحدَّداً على متلقيها، تأثيراً يمكن أن يكون مادة لسؤال مدرسي عن مواطن الجمال، عن صورتين ممتدتين متضادتين: شخص تحول إلى ذبابة تنشر الفوضى وتشعل النار في مقابل خرزات نظم ينحدرن توافقاً على إعلان حقيقة قانونية مطلقة. هكذا يعكس نص الإحالة إحساساً عمومياً منضبطاً بالجمال (لا يرى أخطائه بكل تأكيد) وبلاغة عمومية لا تأتي بالضرورة من معرفة عن قرب بكتب أو تراث كتابة معين، بل هو “الحس السليم” للغة كما يُدرَّس، كما يُلقَّن في مدارس الدولة، حيث مجازات تعكس خيالاً محدوداً، ومفرغة من المعنى (هل أثار الفصل الروائي الفوضى فعلاً؟ هل رأها أي قاص أو دان؟ هل تدنى مؤشر الحياء في المجتمع المصري بعد أن نشر ناجي فصله؟) يُلقى بها في أذن من عليه أن يقدّر جمالها، من تدرب جيداً على ذلك.
“الذبابة” في قرار الإحالة، وهو المجاز الذي يمكننا أن نفترض أنه يلخص رؤية النيابة، محددة تماماً، واضحة المعنى مسبقاً. لا يحتاج المرء إلى التفكير كثيراً في معناها. هذا هو الحس السليم على أي حال. الذبابة مصدر ضيق. تثير القرف. تحمل المرض وتنشره. الحضارة، هكذا يبدو الأمر، تعتمد على نفي الذبابة، وهو ما قد يعني أيضاً نفي القاذورات والنجاسات والخراء (بالمناسبة، هل يحاسب القانون على استخدام كلمة الخراء؟ ما هي الكلمة الأكثر صداقةً للقانون، الكلمة التي يجيزها، ولا يراها تخدش؟ الهراء؟ ) بكلمات أخرى، إن قبلنا أراء بنيامين وكونديرا، في هذا الشأن، فنفي الذبابة هو لحظة ميلاد الكيتش.
أسلوبياً، نص قرار الإحالة بأكمله نموذج مثالي لكتابة الكيتش، إن أخذنا في اعتبارنا تعريف فالتر بنيامين للكيتش بأنه “لا شيء سوى فن متوفر للاستهلاك بدرجة مائة في المائة، مطلقاً ولحظياً، تحديداً داخل الأشكال المكرسة للتعبير [التي يعرفها ويقدرها “القاصي قبل الداني،” على سبيل المثال،] ولهذا، يقف الكيتش والفن في تضاد لا يقبل التوفيق” (مشروع البواكي، ٣٥٩) أما عن التصورات المسبقة التي تجعل لغة هذا القرار على ما هي عليه، والتي تمنحه مفاهيمه المسبقة عن الحياة، والسلوك القويم، والحياء العام، والسعادة المعقمة الطاهرة الخالية من “القاذورات والنجاسات” فينطبق عليها تعريف ميلان كونديرا للكيتش على أنه المثال الجمالي (وقد نضيف الحياتي) “الذي يُنكر فيه الخراء ويتصرف الجميع كما لو كان لا يوجد.” (كائن لا تُحتمل خفته) يستخدم كونديرا “الخراء” كمجاز بطبيعة الحال، للإشارة إلى كل ما قد يثير وجوده، في طباع بعض البشر، في أجسادهم، كعضو بين أعضائهم، في رغباتهم، وفي طرق حياتهم قلق البعض الآخر، كل ما قد يؤدي إلى قلق حاد يصل لنفي وجود مصدر القلق من الأساس، ويؤدي أما إلى تجاهل وجوده (لا يجب تسمية الأعضاء الخاصة! ) أو إلى معاملته كشذوذ عن قاعدة أو عادة يجب عقابه.
من المهم أن نلاحظ هنا أنه لا توجد مشكلة جوهرية في وجود الكيتش في ذاته، كنظرة للفن أو للحياة، ذلك أنه توجد على أي حال أنواع مختلفة، وأحياناً متضادة، من الكيتش. فكما هو الحال في كل مجاز، لا يعني “الخراء” شيئاً واحداً لكل الناس. تظهر المشكلة حين نضطر إلى التعامل مع ما يطلق عليه كونديرا “الكيتش الشمولي” ويعرّفه كما يلي:
حين أقول “شمولياً،” ما أعنيه هو أن كل شيء يهدد الكيتش يتعين نفيه من الحياة: كل تبدي للفردية (إذ الانحراف عن المجموع هي بصقة في عين الأخوة المبتسمة)؛ كل شك (لأن كل من يبدأ في الشك في التفاصيل سوف ينتهي به الحال إلى الشك في الحياة ذاتها)؛ كل سخرية (لأنه في عالم الكيتش كل شيء يجب أخذه بجدية تامة).
ما خدشه ناجي هو هذا التصور المدرسي عن اللغة والجمال والسعادة، وذلك الكيتش الشمولي المسلح بسطوة القانون، مثلما خدش تصوراً معيناً للحياء العام في قلب ذلك الكيتش الشمولي. لكن ما هو ذلك الحياء العام الذي يرفع من شأنه الأب والقانون وكل من ينوب عنهما؟ ما معناه؟ من يقرّر معناه؟ هل يحاول القانون حتى أن يُسمِّي أفعال خدش الحياء؟ هل يقارب الدقة ويعدّدها؟ وهل يكمن عدم الحياء في التسمية، في اللغة؟ هل يرتبط الأمر بالفعل ذاته أم باللغة المستخدمة في وصف الفعل؟ هل الأمر أنه في الفصل (أو المقال!) الذي يُحاكَّم يُعطِي بسام (الشخص الخيالي، الراوي غير القانوني، الذي لا يعرفه القانون) أكثر مما ينبغي من التفاصيل، أنه أكثر دقة مما يجب أن يكون، أم أنه يأتي أفعالاً تثير القلق لأنها تفسد هناء الحياة في كيتش الصفاء، أفعالاً لا تتصف بالحياء، وبالتالي يشجع آخرين على إتيانها؟ ما الجاذبية المفترضة لأفعال يفترض القانون ذاته أنها تسبب ألماً للقارئ، تخدش شيئاً جوهرياً في تكوينه السليم النقي؟ ألا يجب أن يكون تأثيرها هو النفور؟ ألا يجب أن تثير تلك الأفعال غثيان كل قارئ؟ ألا يجب أن يتألم أنفه وتصله رائحة سيئة، فيرفضها؟ أليست السعادة على أي حال هي تجنب الألم؟ أم هل يفترض القانون أن كل من يأتي تحت سيطرته يميل، بالطبيعة البشرية، نحو الانحراف؟ وما هو “الانحراف” إن كان القانون يفترض تحديداً أن كل ذات تخضع له منحرفة مسبقاً وتحتاج إلى حماية، تستوجب أن يضعها القانون تحت نظرته؟ هل يحمي القانون ذواته من أنفسهم؟
في ذلك الفصل الذي نشر الفوضى وأشعل النار في الهشيم، ينزل بسام على المرأة التي يقابلها في شقتها. يقترب بأنفه من أعضاءها الخاصة، من تلك الأجزاء التي يهتم بها القانون كثيراً. يقترب بشفتيه ولسانه منها، وبأنفه أيضاً، من أجزاء تصدر عنها مخلفات الجسد، مما يجب أن نبتعد جميعاً عنه، وننكره. يشم منها ما يهدّد الحضارة، ما يتعين أن يكون مكروهاً. يأخذ هيئة الحيوان الجاثي، على أربع ربما، ويبتعد عن القانون. هل ما يجده القانون إشكالياً هو أن بسام فعل ذلك أم وصفه، تحديداً أنه وصفه بألفاظ صريحة؟ هل كان الأمر ليختلف إن استخدم لغة أخرى، إن استخدم مجازات مدرسية، تقترح ولا تصرح؟ ماذا عن: “وتحركت نفسي بالشهوة فأعطيتها الجنس الفموي؟” أم هل سيروق للمحقق أكثر إن قال: “ثم استولى الشر على نفسي، فارتشفت رحيقها الأنثوي، فتحركت داخلي شهوة فانية، وأسكرتني لذة زائلة، فصرنا حيوانين أو أدنى، ومت، في نهاية المطاف، لأن هذا الرحيق، عزيزي القارئ، ليس سوى سماً؟” هل سيخدش مثل هذا القول حياء شخص ما، هل سيتحول بسام، لا إلى ذبابة، بل لنحلة مخلفاتها عسل؟ (بالمناسبة، أحد المجازات الكيتشية الساحرة حقاً تصف ما اقترب منه بسام، وحدد اسمه، بـ”الوردة” أو “الزهرة”).
كيف نواجه مثل هذه المتاهة التي تُدخلنا فيها بيروقراطية القانون؟ أو كيف نحاول أن نخرج منها؟
في مواجهة القانون وتجاوزاته ومحاكماته المتكررة لأعمال إبداعية، ثمة إغراء براجماتي في أن نضع الأمر بأكمله في زاوية “محاكمة الخيال”، الافتراض المبدئي هنا هو أن القانون، على عكس الأدب، يخلو من الخيال ولا يفهمه، ولهذا لا يستطيع أو ليس من حقه أن يفرض قواعده على ما يأتي عن نشاط بشري (يوصف، إعلاءً لقدره، بـ”الإبداعي”) ليس بمقدور القانون، بسبب طبيعته، أن يتفهمه.
لكن هل يخلو القانون من خيال حقاً؟ من أين يأتي إذن إن كان كذلك؟ وكيف له أن يعبّر عن نفسه؟ هل له قصة أو تاريخ يمكن أن يُحكى؟ وماذا عن لغته، بل وماذا عن المجازات التي يستخدمها لوضع أوامره ونواهيه، “خدش الحياء العام” على سبيل المثال في مادة القانون التي يُحاكم بمقتضاها أحمد ناجي أحمد حجازي؟ ما معنى الخدش هنا، في القانون وفي الأدب؟ وما الذي يمكن أن يُخدش؟ الجلد، الزجاج، القانون، الحياء، المرآة مجاز الفن؟ أي مجازات يمكن أن تُخدش؟ وهل يمكن أن يفكّر القانون في لذة الخدش، في ارتباط ما محتمل، قد يحدث، بين اللذة والخدش؟ أي فكرة يحملها القانون عن اللذة وتاريخيتها والقانون الأخلاقي كما يتحدث عنه فرويد على سبيل المثال؟ وما هو “الحياء” سوى إن كان خيالاً، مفهوماً تاريخياً يتكون في سياق معين وتاريخ محدَّد. نفس الأسئلة من الممكن طرحها بخصوص مفهوم العام/العمومية. ما الذي يمكن أن يوصف بالعمومية؟ من يقرر ذلك؟ من يقيس النسبة؟ أي جماعة متخيلة، طبقية أو مهنية أو عمرية، تنطبق على معاييرها مفهوم “العام”؟
http://ahmednaje.net/2016/02/zbab/
جاك ديريدا، أمام القانون
يدخل أحمد ناجي أحمد حجازي، الذات القانونية، بصحبة أحمد ناجي، الكاتب، وبسام، الراوي الرئيسي لـ “استخدام الحياة”، والرواية أيضاً (تحديداً فصل واحد منها)، إلى متاهة القانون.
لقد خدش، أو خدشوا جميعاً، “الحياء العام”، هكذا يخبرنا من يمثّل القانون.
“سخر . . . أنامله،” تقول النيابة في قرار إحالته إلى المحاكمة “لنشر مادة كتابية نفث فيها شهوة فانية ولذة زائلة وأجر عقله وقلمه لتوجه خبيث حمل انتهاكاً لحرمة الآداب العامة وحسن الأخلاق والأغراء بالعهر خروجاً على عاطفة الحياء وهدماً للمثل المصطلح عليها فولدت [مَن؟ المادة الكتابية؟] سفاحاً مشاهد صورت اجتماع الجنسين جهرة وما لبث ينشر سموم قلمه برواية أو مقال في صفراء باليه حتى وقعت تحت يد القاصى قبل الدانى والقاصر قبل البالغ فأضحى كالذباب لا يرى إلا القاذورات والنجاسات فيسلط عليها الأضواء والكاميرات حتى عمت الفوضى وانتشرت النار في الهشيم وجاءت تحريات جهة البحث كخرزات نظم ينحدرن توافقاً على قيام المتهم بكتابة المقال وأحتوائه على الفاظ خادشة للحياء”
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لا يخبرنا قرار الإحالة بما فعل أحمد ناجي أحمد حجازي على وجه التحديد. إنه يشير فقط وعلينا أن نفهم. علينا أن نقطع طريقنا من مجاز إلى آخر، من محسن بديعي إلى آخر، من خطأ لغوي لآخر (كاتب هذا المقال ليس ضد الأخطاء بشكل خاص، لكن ربما من المهم أن نلاحظها حين تأتي من القانون وبيروقراطيته) حتى النهاية. علينا، ربما، أن يملأنا الإعجاب أيضاً بهذه اللغة “الجميلة” التي تُدين شخصاً تحول إلى ذبابة.
يبدو قرار الإحالة مثل تدريب مدرسي متحمس على كتابة مقال. وكما يحدث في الحالات الشبيهة، يجد الكاتب لذة لا تفنى، وسعادة لا تزول من مخزون لا نهائي، معدّ سلفاً، من قائمة مجازات يُعاد تدويرها باستمرار، مرة بعد مرة بعد مرة، من موضوع تعبير إلى آخر، ولهذا فهي مضمونة التأثير. عليها خاتم ما، ربما للدولة، أو لمؤسساتها التعليمية، أو ربما هو ختم المجازات العامة. أجازته سلطة ما، وضمنت تأثيراً مُحدَّداً على متلقيها، تأثيراً يمكن أن يكون مادة لسؤال مدرسي عن مواطن الجمال، عن صورتين ممتدتين متضادتين: شخص تحول إلى ذبابة تنشر الفوضى وتشعل النار في مقابل خرزات نظم ينحدرن توافقاً على إعلان حقيقة قانونية مطلقة. هكذا يعكس نص الإحالة إحساساً عمومياً منضبطاً بالجمال (لا يرى أخطائه بكل تأكيد) وبلاغة عمومية لا تأتي بالضرورة من معرفة عن قرب بكتب أو تراث كتابة معين، بل هو “الحس السليم” للغة كما يُدرَّس، كما يُلقَّن في مدارس الدولة، حيث مجازات تعكس خيالاً محدوداً، ومفرغة من المعنى (هل أثار الفصل الروائي الفوضى فعلاً؟ هل رأها أي قاص أو دان؟ هل تدنى مؤشر الحياء في المجتمع المصري بعد أن نشر ناجي فصله؟) يُلقى بها في أذن من عليه أن يقدّر جمالها، من تدرب جيداً على ذلك.
“الذبابة” في قرار الإحالة، وهو المجاز الذي يمكننا أن نفترض أنه يلخص رؤية النيابة، محددة تماماً، واضحة المعنى مسبقاً. لا يحتاج المرء إلى التفكير كثيراً في معناها. هذا هو الحس السليم على أي حال. الذبابة مصدر ضيق. تثير القرف. تحمل المرض وتنشره. الحضارة، هكذا يبدو الأمر، تعتمد على نفي الذبابة، وهو ما قد يعني أيضاً نفي القاذورات والنجاسات والخراء (بالمناسبة، هل يحاسب القانون على استخدام كلمة الخراء؟ ما هي الكلمة الأكثر صداقةً للقانون، الكلمة التي يجيزها، ولا يراها تخدش؟ الهراء؟ ) بكلمات أخرى، إن قبلنا أراء بنيامين وكونديرا، في هذا الشأن، فنفي الذبابة هو لحظة ميلاد الكيتش.
أسلوبياً، نص قرار الإحالة بأكمله نموذج مثالي لكتابة الكيتش، إن أخذنا في اعتبارنا تعريف فالتر بنيامين للكيتش بأنه “لا شيء سوى فن متوفر للاستهلاك بدرجة مائة في المائة، مطلقاً ولحظياً، تحديداً داخل الأشكال المكرسة للتعبير [التي يعرفها ويقدرها “القاصي قبل الداني،” على سبيل المثال،] ولهذا، يقف الكيتش والفن في تضاد لا يقبل التوفيق” (مشروع البواكي، ٣٥٩) أما عن التصورات المسبقة التي تجعل لغة هذا القرار على ما هي عليه، والتي تمنحه مفاهيمه المسبقة عن الحياة، والسلوك القويم، والحياء العام، والسعادة المعقمة الطاهرة الخالية من “القاذورات والنجاسات” فينطبق عليها تعريف ميلان كونديرا للكيتش على أنه المثال الجمالي (وقد نضيف الحياتي) “الذي يُنكر فيه الخراء ويتصرف الجميع كما لو كان لا يوجد.” (كائن لا تُحتمل خفته) يستخدم كونديرا “الخراء” كمجاز بطبيعة الحال، للإشارة إلى كل ما قد يثير وجوده، في طباع بعض البشر، في أجسادهم، كعضو بين أعضائهم، في رغباتهم، وفي طرق حياتهم قلق البعض الآخر، كل ما قد يؤدي إلى قلق حاد يصل لنفي وجود مصدر القلق من الأساس، ويؤدي أما إلى تجاهل وجوده (لا يجب تسمية الأعضاء الخاصة! ) أو إلى معاملته كشذوذ عن قاعدة أو عادة يجب عقابه.
من المهم أن نلاحظ هنا أنه لا توجد مشكلة جوهرية في وجود الكيتش في ذاته، كنظرة للفن أو للحياة، ذلك أنه توجد على أي حال أنواع مختلفة، وأحياناً متضادة، من الكيتش. فكما هو الحال في كل مجاز، لا يعني “الخراء” شيئاً واحداً لكل الناس. تظهر المشكلة حين نضطر إلى التعامل مع ما يطلق عليه كونديرا “الكيتش الشمولي” ويعرّفه كما يلي:
حين أقول “شمولياً،” ما أعنيه هو أن كل شيء يهدد الكيتش يتعين نفيه من الحياة: كل تبدي للفردية (إذ الانحراف عن المجموع هي بصقة في عين الأخوة المبتسمة)؛ كل شك (لأن كل من يبدأ في الشك في التفاصيل سوف ينتهي به الحال إلى الشك في الحياة ذاتها)؛ كل سخرية (لأنه في عالم الكيتش كل شيء يجب أخذه بجدية تامة).
ما خدشه ناجي هو هذا التصور المدرسي عن اللغة والجمال والسعادة، وذلك الكيتش الشمولي المسلح بسطوة القانون، مثلما خدش تصوراً معيناً للحياء العام في قلب ذلك الكيتش الشمولي. لكن ما هو ذلك الحياء العام الذي يرفع من شأنه الأب والقانون وكل من ينوب عنهما؟ ما معناه؟ من يقرّر معناه؟ هل يحاول القانون حتى أن يُسمِّي أفعال خدش الحياء؟ هل يقارب الدقة ويعدّدها؟ وهل يكمن عدم الحياء في التسمية، في اللغة؟ هل يرتبط الأمر بالفعل ذاته أم باللغة المستخدمة في وصف الفعل؟ هل الأمر أنه في الفصل (أو المقال!) الذي يُحاكَّم يُعطِي بسام (الشخص الخيالي، الراوي غير القانوني، الذي لا يعرفه القانون) أكثر مما ينبغي من التفاصيل، أنه أكثر دقة مما يجب أن يكون، أم أنه يأتي أفعالاً تثير القلق لأنها تفسد هناء الحياة في كيتش الصفاء، أفعالاً لا تتصف بالحياء، وبالتالي يشجع آخرين على إتيانها؟ ما الجاذبية المفترضة لأفعال يفترض القانون ذاته أنها تسبب ألماً للقارئ، تخدش شيئاً جوهرياً في تكوينه السليم النقي؟ ألا يجب أن يكون تأثيرها هو النفور؟ ألا يجب أن تثير تلك الأفعال غثيان كل قارئ؟ ألا يجب أن يتألم أنفه وتصله رائحة سيئة، فيرفضها؟ أليست السعادة على أي حال هي تجنب الألم؟ أم هل يفترض القانون أن كل من يأتي تحت سيطرته يميل، بالطبيعة البشرية، نحو الانحراف؟ وما هو “الانحراف” إن كان القانون يفترض تحديداً أن كل ذات تخضع له منحرفة مسبقاً وتحتاج إلى حماية، تستوجب أن يضعها القانون تحت نظرته؟ هل يحمي القانون ذواته من أنفسهم؟
في ذلك الفصل الذي نشر الفوضى وأشعل النار في الهشيم، ينزل بسام على المرأة التي يقابلها في شقتها. يقترب بأنفه من أعضاءها الخاصة، من تلك الأجزاء التي يهتم بها القانون كثيراً. يقترب بشفتيه ولسانه منها، وبأنفه أيضاً، من أجزاء تصدر عنها مخلفات الجسد، مما يجب أن نبتعد جميعاً عنه، وننكره. يشم منها ما يهدّد الحضارة، ما يتعين أن يكون مكروهاً. يأخذ هيئة الحيوان الجاثي، على أربع ربما، ويبتعد عن القانون. هل ما يجده القانون إشكالياً هو أن بسام فعل ذلك أم وصفه، تحديداً أنه وصفه بألفاظ صريحة؟ هل كان الأمر ليختلف إن استخدم لغة أخرى، إن استخدم مجازات مدرسية، تقترح ولا تصرح؟ ماذا عن: “وتحركت نفسي بالشهوة فأعطيتها الجنس الفموي؟” أم هل سيروق للمحقق أكثر إن قال: “ثم استولى الشر على نفسي، فارتشفت رحيقها الأنثوي، فتحركت داخلي شهوة فانية، وأسكرتني لذة زائلة، فصرنا حيوانين أو أدنى، ومت، في نهاية المطاف، لأن هذا الرحيق، عزيزي القارئ، ليس سوى سماً؟” هل سيخدش مثل هذا القول حياء شخص ما، هل سيتحول بسام، لا إلى ذبابة، بل لنحلة مخلفاتها عسل؟ (بالمناسبة، أحد المجازات الكيتشية الساحرة حقاً تصف ما اقترب منه بسام، وحدد اسمه، بـ”الوردة” أو “الزهرة”).
كيف نواجه مثل هذه المتاهة التي تُدخلنا فيها بيروقراطية القانون؟ أو كيف نحاول أن نخرج منها؟
في مواجهة القانون وتجاوزاته ومحاكماته المتكررة لأعمال إبداعية، ثمة إغراء براجماتي في أن نضع الأمر بأكمله في زاوية “محاكمة الخيال”، الافتراض المبدئي هنا هو أن القانون، على عكس الأدب، يخلو من الخيال ولا يفهمه، ولهذا لا يستطيع أو ليس من حقه أن يفرض قواعده على ما يأتي عن نشاط بشري (يوصف، إعلاءً لقدره، بـ”الإبداعي”) ليس بمقدور القانون، بسبب طبيعته، أن يتفهمه.
لكن هل يخلو القانون من خيال حقاً؟ من أين يأتي إذن إن كان كذلك؟ وكيف له أن يعبّر عن نفسه؟ هل له قصة أو تاريخ يمكن أن يُحكى؟ وماذا عن لغته، بل وماذا عن المجازات التي يستخدمها لوضع أوامره ونواهيه، “خدش الحياء العام” على سبيل المثال في مادة القانون التي يُحاكم بمقتضاها أحمد ناجي أحمد حجازي؟ ما معنى الخدش هنا، في القانون وفي الأدب؟ وما الذي يمكن أن يُخدش؟ الجلد، الزجاج، القانون، الحياء، المرآة مجاز الفن؟ أي مجازات يمكن أن تُخدش؟ وهل يمكن أن يفكّر القانون في لذة الخدش، في ارتباط ما محتمل، قد يحدث، بين اللذة والخدش؟ أي فكرة يحملها القانون عن اللذة وتاريخيتها والقانون الأخلاقي كما يتحدث عنه فرويد على سبيل المثال؟ وما هو “الحياء” سوى إن كان خيالاً، مفهوماً تاريخياً يتكون في سياق معين وتاريخ محدَّد. نفس الأسئلة من الممكن طرحها بخصوص مفهوم العام/العمومية. ما الذي يمكن أن يوصف بالعمومية؟ من يقرر ذلك؟ من يقيس النسبة؟ أي جماعة متخيلة، طبقية أو مهنية أو عمرية، تنطبق على معاييرها مفهوم “العام”؟
http://ahmednaje.net/2016/02/zbab/
