The Ambassadors Magazine - January 2009

The Lodging House

by KHAIRY SHALABY
Winner of the Saif Ghobash-Banipal
Prize for Arabic Literary Translation in 2007.
Publisher: American University in Cairo Press (AUC)

Reviewed by Amanda Farnham

The Lodging House (Wikalat Atiya) chronicles the precocious life of a young Egyptian man as he embarks on a journey from his rural background, to the streets of Damanhour to the courtyard of Wikalat Atiya, a chaotic unruly shanty-like enclave in the city. Comprised of cunning passages, makeshift corridors and mesmerizing labyrinths, the nameless narrator guides the reader through a maze of existential upheaval, self-doubt, dread, grandeur and lust imbued in Wikalat Atiya.

This book is the first major English translation of Khairy Shalaby's work. A writer with an unusual life, Shalaby was born in Kafr al-Shaykh village, in the Nile Delta, in 1938 and spent much of his early life scrambling for sustenance and working many odd jobs to make ends meet. He lived for many years in the Cairo's city of the dead, a large complex of graveyards where impoverished families settle. Today, he is one of Egypt's most distinguished authors despite few of his works gaining repute outside the Arab world. Shalaby published his first novel in the late 1950s, and has since authored 70 works, including 12 novels, collections of short stories, historical tales, and critical studies. Shalaby's previous titles have been translated to French, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Urdu, Hebrew, and other languages, many of which were adapted for film and television, including The Lodging House (Wikalat Atiya). The Arabic edition of the book was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2003. He was awarded the Egyptian National Prize for Literature 1980-1981, and is presently editor-in-chief of both Poetry Magazine and Library of Popular Studies books series published by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture.

The reclusive pioneer of the modern Egyptian novel
and Shalaby's literary father, Yehia Haqqi.

One of Egypt's most daring intellectual luminaries of the second half of the 20th century, Khairy Shalaby 's literary style lays open the complexity of the socio-political and existential issues with which modern Egyptians are faced, most notably shedding light on the dispossessed, occupying the lowest ranks of Egyptian society. His work reflects an innovative combination of the classical and colloquial with unassuming ease. Shalaby draws from the literary influence of Yehia Haqqi and emulates the powerful language reflected in the Sira, by incorporating a popular colloquial style that gives his readership a unique proximity to the story and its characters. Shalaby also courageously violates the stylistic sensibilities of the classical Arabic novel with an attention to the vulgarity of everyday speech. In fact it remains incredibly uncommon for Arabic language literature to utilize slang profanities. Furthermore, at times, the broken syntax, the casual enunciation of conversational Egyptian dialect can be a bit overwhelming for a non-acquainted readership, however, the use of the vernacular presents the reader with a more intimate experience of the smells, sounds, tastes, and environments of the Wakala and Damanhour.

Khairy Shalaby's The Lodging House offers its readership an intellectually honest, and highly imaginative portrait of the city and its relation to the rural hinterlands. Touched with sardonic humour and tempered with insightful dichotomies, this novel is provocative, eloquent and raw. Wikalat Atiya, is an historic but now completely run-down caravanserai on the delta city of Damanhour, which has become a refuge for the renegades who inhabit the underbelly of Egyptian society, holding the reputation, in the minds of some villagers, of "a dump and refuge of the downtrodden and place of ill repute."

In Shalaby's Wikalat Atiya, the reader vicariously experiences the main character's exploration of Egyptian society during the Nasser era at a time when the regime was cracking down on members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The novel vacillates between two spaces in an attempt to solve the dilemmas posed by the narrator's quest for "purpose" coupled with his attempt to reconcile his identity as a failed student. In occupying spaces of ambivalence, the narrator is trapped in a painful structural and existential conflict within a community and culture that reflects his rural origins. The narrator is represented as a problematic self that is unable or unwilling to assume its integrative social and symbolic function; one that would have perhaps saved him from the dregs of Wikalat Atiya -- a metonymic landscape that gradually leads into his family history and struggles with estrangement and societal failures.

In the opening line of the first chapter, the narrator laments, "I never thought I could be brought down so low that I would accept living in Wikalat Atiya." He then reveals how his downfall came about when he was expelled from the Public Teachers' Institute for brutally assaulting Wael Effendi, his mathematics teacher.

In the Nasser years, education was made widely available, notably to peasants. This created an environment of opportunity but also one suffused with tension between the rural peasants and urban (colonial) elites. The narrator captures this tension when he scornfully recounts how Wael Effendi, "was not happy that the sons of detestable peasants from villages, and hamlets, more like barefoot riffraff than anything else, could excel in education over the true sons of schools, originally from elite backgrounds and good, wealthy folks" - an allusion to the coercive political and discursive colonial power struggles Nasser's social policies created.

The narrator's inability to manage these historical and social, deeply political impulses becomes evident when Wael Effendi proceeds to relentlessly harangue and provoke him to the point where upon kicking him out of the class room, the narrator attacks him "like a rabid dog." What follows is a belligerent's rampage against the teacher, who is eventually taken to the hospital in critical condition, inciting an embittered disclosure by the narrator of a comment made by the dean of the Institute who, "cursed Taha Hussein as one who destroyed education and polluted it with lowlifes like me."

Strikingly, the narrator feels no remorse for the Wael Effendis, who is being taken away in the physical condition of a "shredded heap, stained with blood, my blood and his." Further noting, "I was certain that I had quenched my thirst for revenge and avenged my wounded pride, and many of my classmates were looking at me with a great deal of sorrow tinged with something like admiration; but I would still go to jail and my future would be ruined at his hands, and that I would undoubtedly kill him the moment I was free again." But a year later, after he returns to the Institute with knife in hand, intending to stab Wael Effendi in the heart, he sees that "he was disfigured by the loss of an eye where apparently, in my madness, I had gouged it out, and the marks my teeth had dug in all over his face were still there, and he walked to class a broken man...I noticed my hand on the knife handle loosening in my pocket and I was overcome with a kind of pity for the both of us."

These early experiences have a determinant effect on the way the narrator subsequently seeks to achieve subjective selfhood in the face of his liminality, his dislocation, his instability, as he begins his slippery descent into the underworld of Damahour, and its parasitic microcosm of Wikalat Atiya. The narrator's circumstance intimates a powerful social metaphor that ties individual meaning to a collective history and specifically a rural one, all of which lies at the core of Wakalat Atiya. As demonstrated when the narrator pre-emptively "estranges" himself from his village and city, noting only that the incident with Wael Effendi necessarily resulted in such a course.

The narrator becomes a long-haired, bearded monad living and sleeping on the streets of Damanhour. He befriends a young ebullient vegetable hawker, Mahrous, who is the first to introduce the narrator to the infamous Wikalat Atiya, and incidentally to the smoking of hashish.

Upon entry through the gate of Wikalat Atiya, the novel slowly begins to enter the realm of the absurd, as the denizens are displayed like puppets or some, almost fantastical and unlikely characters from another cosmos. The narrator becomes close friends with the Wikala's grotesque guardian Amm Shawadfi, who is rumoured to have swindled the buildings-owner Atiya out of the property ten years earlier.

The most endearing moments in The Lodging House are Shalaby's sensitive and comical portrayals of the beggars and dervishes that make up the social fabric and character of Wikalat Atiya, teaching the lesson that the Wikala is at once everything and nothing like what it seems. It is a place of mesmerism where every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative, in that it always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself. One such example is when Etaita, an elderly denizen of Wikalat is caught at one point in the book pretending to sell candy on the street but is really in fact tossing alcohol-soaked corn to the chickens there, and then collecting the ones who passed out drunk.

The novel also reveals the significant role that two institutions play in Egyptian society--marriage and the law. While the two are considered very rigid and almost dogmatically theological, they become haphazard and improvised in the unpredictability of Wikalat Atiya. This is most explicit when Amm Shawadfi's assumes the role as a proxy marriage registrar in order to wed his two comical tenants, Abd al-Fadil Bayyumi al-Toudi from the village of al-Toud, Behaira and Sabiha al-Birshoumi Hasanayn. When mention of a legally binding state-issued marriage contract was voiced, Amm Shawadfi "snorted as if gurgling sarcastically, "Law? What kind of law are you talking about? The law is for dimwits! Just do what I tell you, I guarantee. I'll even pay you to do it. Here's a whole piaster in exchange for you writing the contract." The satire in this engagement is that though it is not "official" per se, Amm Shawadfi still crafts a marriage contract in accordance with his – and presumably the soon to be newlyweds' – values. Instructing the narrator to document his words verbatim, he assumes the role of an authority in his recitation of the vowels to the couple,

"I affirm and avow that I am Abd al-Fadil Bayyumi al-Toudi from the village of al-Toud, Behaira, and I reside in Wikalat Atiya at the end of the Old Shubra, Damanhour, and my occupation is haunti, that is, I wash the dead – I have wed, that is, married, Sabiha al-Birshoumi Hassanyn, occupation daiya, that is, midwife, who also resides in Wikalat Atiya; our marriage is in accordance with Islamic law and the sunnas of the Prophet , a dowry known only to each of us, and a dowry balance in the amount of five pounds, that I am obligated to pay to the last miliems if we are to divorce on fair terms."

This illustrates the irony behind the modern legal order and that of Wakalat Atiya – notably, Shawadfi seems to play an overriding role in not just setting, but personifying the legal stage--as the policeman, the attorney, the judge and the jury.

Throughout the book, sexual expression is starkly contrasted between the highly prescribed society at large and the unrestrained lawlessness of a sexually deviant Wikala. Women play an increasingly aggressive and effervescent sexual role throughout the novel, whereas men are often portrayed as passive observers servile to the incredulous whims of Egyptian women. Notably, the two most evocative and memorable female characters in The Lodging House, are Badriya al-Qabbani and Dumyana, the monkey woman.

Badriya occupies a financially stable existence, far removed from the dregs of the Wakala. Upon reflection on his cousin Badriya's past, the narrator highlights her disquieting and unfortunate circumstance of having been "…admitted to the psychiatric hospital in Alexandria for a month or longer…Some men in my family attributed that to a psychosocial problem that affected the girl because she hadn't married and no one had proposed to her despite her father's wealth and which she might inherit." But after an intimate exchange with Badriya, the narrator learns that she was admitted to the psychiatric hospital as a young child because the owner of her family's house had raped her. Through a series of similar exchanges, the narrator develops deeper feelings for Badriya, which a Western reader unfamiliar with conventional and frequent inter-familial coupling among second cousins in Arab countries might misconstrue. Especially given the provocative language the narrator uses to describe Badriya namely, "[a]n edifice oozing femininity and lust; a giant that only the god of sex himself could satisfy. Two well-turned legs with caves as white and as rich as marble. Two succulent heels on sandals displaying their captive crimson blood [,] [who despite her vitality and appeal remains unmarriageable because of her huge, [unnatural] lips."

Another female character that shocks the nerves and insults the senses is Dumyana the monkey woman, an inhabitant of Wakala and the narrator's neighbour. Dumyana engages in aggressive, symbolically grotesque expressions of sexual bestiality and inhumane sexual dominance over her pet monkeys.

Shalaby's expression of unusual candor in discussing matters of intimacy and sexual identity, rather perversely and provocatively, shed light upon the social taboos associated with the expressions of lust and sexual longing within conservative Islamic and Arab countries. Perhaps it is his aim to dramatize and magnify the most primitive, grotesque elements to illuminate the hypocrisy embedded within religious conservatism, as well as to showcase the extremes that imposed sexual conservatism produces.

Another striking feature of Wikalat Atiya is its cohesive community and social order. To a Western readership, this is particularly noteworthy as it serves to accentuate the central role family and community play in Egyptian Society (i.e. if social cohesion such as that expressed in Wikalat Atiya exists in the most degenerative spaces, then they surely have a seminal role to play outside of communities on the fringe).

Shalaby vividly captures the potency, essence, fragility, absurdity and wonder of human existence in modern society. Namely, the anonymous narrator who is engrossed in problems of alienation, loneliness, and estrangement, which seem to only magnify in scope when he is confronted with larger existential questions about the meaning of life, and his search for personal and cultural identity during a time of societal and personal change.

In the interior of Wakalat Atiya, the narrator finds himself faced with himself, and perhaps most daunting of all, is his existential realization that it is the individual who must give meaning to his circumstance; yet he cannot reconcile his longing for something else, something different, and cannot escape from the harrowing reality of his existence in Wakalat Atiya. At this critical juncture in the novel, existentialism seems to cast light on the narrator's articulation of mixed feelings of attraction and repulsion to a place such as Wakalat Atiya and the dizzying contradictions and paradoxes it breeds. Transfixed in a moment of ennui, the narrator notes:

This drove home for me the point that the rooms of the wikala were nothing more than wings of a stage and here were the actors going onto the state wearing the costumes for their roles. This inspired me to get up and put on the costume for a role to play. It was at this point that I came face to face with a fact that depressed me to no end, so much so that I almost let out a deep and pained groan: I had no role to play on any stage, not even that of an extra!

Ultimately, the narrator's burden is not to clear his conscience, but to learn how to bear it.

A major source of inspiration behind Shalaby's works and his understanding of Egyptian life is the predicament of the Egyptian peasant. Many of his stories bear witness to this concern; the struggle of the Arab individual with modernity, and all that this implies – migration from village to city, the decline of agriculture in the favour of industry and services, the status of women, education, progress, tradition and attitudes toward religion. It is by extension, the very same vanguard that writers such as Ralph Ellison of the Harlem Renaissance were concerned. In fact, there is not just a striking similarity but an uncanny resemblance between the protagonist-narrator in Shalaby's The Lodging House and Ellison's Invisible Man.

In a gesture reminiscent of W.E.B. Dubois's "double consciousness" – a term is used to describe an individual whose identity is divided into several facets - both novels address many of the social and intellectual issues facing subaltern identities (e.g. African-American identity and Egyptian peasant). For Ellison, it takes it's form in the relationship between this identity and Marxism, black nationalism, and the reformist racial politics of Booker T. Washington; whereas for Shalaby, it is rooted in the remnants of British colonialism, Egyptian nationalism, and Nasserist reformist politics. Shalaby and Ellison both exhibit experimental attitudes and comparable literary styles based heavily upon modern symbolism, which utilizes metaphors, images, and allusions to enhance the emotional and intellectual impact of their novels. Shalaby and Ellison also both reject the idea of writing political novels, and view Naturalism and Realism as too limiting to speak on the broader issues of race in their respective countries. Their novels share the use of the language of music throughout their novels to characterize the deeper cultural meaning in scenes, and central cultural metaphors for interpreting the message behind their meandering, surreal plots. Furthermore, they share the theme of a conflicted protagonist who struggles to make freely willed human choices in the absence of clear, unambiguous moral guidance. Their respective protagonists are not just anonymous and embattled apparitions, they are very much literary embodiments of the authors' selves. Both Ellis and Shalaby's first person narrative style goes beyond the character and into the realm of the autobiographical. Ellis' life had an indelible impression on the Invisible Man in the same manner that Shalaby's personal hardships at the cusps of Egyptian society's hierarchal order impregnates the narrator with Shalaby's own strife.

Shalaby's Wikalat Atiya, and by extension its riveting translation, provide dazzling raconteur, captivating storyline laced with a deeply compelling narrative. Likewise, his English translator, Farouk Abdel Wahab performed the art of translating impeccably--with eloquence and charm.

Amanda Farnham is a gender rights advocate and activist and holds a degree in Philosophy and Ethics from Smith College. She works at the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at the Brookings Institution and currently serves as the VP for External Affairs for Voices Without Borders International (VWBI). Her email is amanda.farnham@gmail.com