Tales from Dayrut: Egyptian Stories

by Mohamed Mustagab, Humphrey Davies (Translator)

This collection of fourteen connected stories and a novella, From the Secret History of Numan Abdel Hafez, takes us deep into Upper Egypt and the village of Dayrut al-Sharif, in which Mohamed Mustagab was born. To depict a world renowned for its poverty, ignorance, vendettas, and implacable code of honor, Mustagab deploys the black humor and Swiftian sarcasm of the insider who knows his society only too well. When the stillness of a day’s end is shattered by a single gunshot, poignant beauty merges seamlessly into horror, and when a police officer seeking to unravel a murder finds himself with more body parts than he knows what to do with, violence tips as easily into farce. In counterpoint, the author’s often surrealist imagination explores the mysteries of a landscape where seductive women haunt dusty paths and a man may find himself crushed like a worm beneath another’s foot. Elsewhere, the horizons of ‘my village’ expand to include other countries (the author worked in the Arabian Peninsula for a number of years), where equally disastrous consequences follow on folly and self-delusion. Previously almost unknown in English, Mustagab’s voice is both original and disturbing.

Genres: Egypt

214 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2008

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Any historian is bound to be afflicted by panic and confusion when he discovers that his hero--the vehicle of his theory--is hiding from him matters of the utmost sensitivity, matters whose revelation may have repercussions on the challenge and response that--so we are told--govern the progress of history, matters that may even subject the entire theory to collapse.

Thus Mustagab pulls our leg twice, pretending that both as the narrator-storyteller of the novella in this book, and as the author of it, he could have been ignorant of the detail that turns the tale in quite a different direction half-way through.

What a discovery. The range of tones presumably reveals Mustagab’s attitude toward his small-town birthplace in upper Egypt. At times it gives a loving inventory of daily activities, at others a black humor picture of superstition and behavior, and at others a horror of its violence. Sometimes all in the same short piece.

From the edge of the Day, we have first a picture of the natural world near sundown, then the human world:

The sun, a little flustered, blushed a brighter red. A fox dropped down into the ditch and, once sure all was well, stuck out its muzzle from the midst of the river hemp foliage, and lapped at the water. A frog poked its head up, causing the fox to stop drinking and ready itself for the hunt...[A man and his son on a donkey ride by.] A mongoose peered out from among the stalks of sugarcane, hoping the traffic would die down so that it could cross the road...My aunt Nafisa lit the oven, sending the smoke billowing and the soot settling on the surface of the platters of fish set out in rows on the ground, their tops crowned with tomatoes, oil, and cracked wheat...The rabbits belonging to Anna Umm Muhammad emerged from their burrows and spread out, their eyes glittering , and sniffed at the stalks in the dust. The Half felt the lips of the hens vents to assure herself they were laying and called out to her daughter, reviling her for her sloth in transferring water from the earthenware butt to the jugs before night came...Three, or possibly four, children made their way toward the kerosene seller at the end of the street, holding bottles and eggs or corn cobs in their hands, and Asil’s wife closed the sack of salt, asking a passerby to move it to from outside the house to inside the house, refusing to sell the salt on credit with the excuse that dark was coming...

Five beautiful pages of these snippets of village life constitute 98 percent of the story, with two short paragraphs at the end to finish it. Just in these lines one sees the economy of the village and nature, the pettiness (and the humanity, in an omitted bit about the man and his son on the donkey), the beauty, the intermingling of man and animal, the physicality of everyday life, and (again in an omitted bit) the many dimensions of Islam and folk beliefs. I found it to be the most beautiful and the most powerful of the stories, due to the devastating combination of the first 98 percent and the last 2 percent.

I haven’t found a lot of information about Mustagab, but I would eagerly search out more of his work in translation. The back cover says he "was general director of the Academy of the Arabic Language in Cairo, and wrote prolifically in the latter half of the twentieth century, receiving numerous prizes." He was lucky to have Humphrey Davies as a translator. Presumably both author and translator participated in choosing phrasings such as ‘ to assure herself that they were laying’ rather than ’to make sure that they were laying’; and ‘with the excuse that dark was coming’ instead of ‘because night was coming’. These turns of phrase give a folk-tale and Arabic feel to the work. As do many of the openings to the stories, where the provenance of the story is laid out in comic fashion, as it is in ways ranging from comic to serious in other Arabic literature I’ve read.

One online source characterizes Mustabag’s stories as black humor, and that certainly fits. People are governed by superstition and revenge, which often cost them far more than they hope to gain. One senses both Mustagab’s love for, and his frustration with, a place that the back cover characterizes as “renowned for its poverty, ignorance, vendettas, and implacable code of honor.” Yet the villagers also live an earth-enriched life. I should also add that some of the stories are simply very funny, if irreverent, specifically “The J-B-Rs”.

The last two-fifths of the book is given to a novella, "The Secret History of Nu’man Abd al-Hafiz" that is a multi-layered delight. The beginning might bring Sterne to mind, as we are totally confused between two names and one, or is it two?, men involved in a birth. Then Huck Finn, a bit of compelled Tom Jones. Per the quote at the top, Sterne again. A comedy of errors and horrors, and a sort of resolution. But woven throughout are direct but infrequent references to national events, far from this little town. They give a concrete time for stories that might have taken place in 1500 or 1950. In fact, they tell us that major scenes happen at the same time as the assassination of Prime Minister Ahmad Mahir Basha in the Egyptian parliament as he called on Egypt to declare war on the Axis powers. Mustagab’s tales emphasize how far from most rural Egyptians’s lives such historic events are; the adventures of Nu’san mean much more to them, and thus much stronger is the frustration of the ‘historian’ in the first quote. Or not; perhaps he had a theory of history that was disturbed by the assassination?

Beautiful writing, strong evocation of a way of life so distant from mine, a strong dose of humanity.

It appears to me that the real danger that prevents us from settling down is that the Lord opened things with us as fishermen, or shepherds, and ended them after we’d been lured into becoming peasants, A greater degree of acumen was called for if we were to understand how the game should then be played.

Highly recommended.

[Rayna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Battle of the Rabbits is a fascinating story. I love reading stories from other parts of the world. This story gives a glimpse at how we see similar things differently.