booker-shortlisted author ahdaf soueif‘s first novel tells the coming of age story of asya al-ulama (b 1950- as was ahdaf who seems to share much else with main character). 

it’s a wonderful introduction to contemporary egyptian culture that delves into the worlds of women; egypt; egyptian women; marriage; egyptian marriages; adultery; female sexuality; and egyptian sexuality. spoiler alert.

set mostly in a beautifully captured post-revolution, privileged, lightly islamic cairo, asya’s hopeless romanticism perhaps parallels that of her pre-67 countryfolk. asya, like egypt, is unable to shake her intrinsic romanticism in the face of repeated disappointments though she piercingly describes the revolution’s fraudulent foundations:

sunday, 26 november, 1967
chrissie and asya walk into the mabarret muhammed ‘ali at eight-thirty. they sign on and walk out again. they walk briskly in the cool morning air through the downtown streets to midan soliman pasha.  they go into groppi’s and order tea and english cake. when it is ten o’clock they walk up the road to cinema qasr el-nil where they watch jane fonda reject her husband in the chapman report. at on o’clock they are back at the hospital, signing off.

cinema cairo is showing un homme et une femme, cinema metro come september, cinema odeon the russian hamletand cinema miami, abd el-halim hafez and shadya in idol of the people. on thursday at one o’clock as they sign off they present their cards and each gets an 80 percent grade.

plus ca change.

disappointment permeates in the eye of the sun. the 1967 egyptian disappointment (chronologically as far back as the book reaches), the disappointments of someone who is rarely in the moment. always awaiting a promised future or missing a forlorn past.  

wed, 22 may 1974

and this is what it all boils down to? all life reduced to this? a small rectangular room with a curtain that doesn’t reach to the floor covering a window looking out over nothing. work: a series of articles that she cannot understand and that read like eating gravel her mentor a man who hides behind his desk and tells her that at twenty four perhaps she is not mature enough to deal with a ph.d. friendship: a plain south american girl balancing on her head in the space between the basin and the door, explaining how being upside-down is good for the system, and farting to prove her point. love: a quarterly visit to a husband that treats her like a pet; to be indulged and given treats as long as she behaves – a husband who turns his back on her every night, who speaks of looking forward to the day when, in the courtesy of advancing years, they will address each other as ‘asya hanim’ and seif bey’ and take gentle strolls round the garden of the house he will build for them in the desert – and wait to die.

and what about life? what about all the years that still have to pass? emptiness. and then only the end of age.

and now she shivers with dread: has it already happened to her/ has she, without knowing, crossed that line; crossed from the land where everything is yet to come into the land from which you can look back and think it might have come – but didn’t? but then she thinks of summers in alexandria and the songs of abd el-halimn hafez, marking the passage of the years:

‘over the thorns of my road led me
saying: come, let’s go love
after years it said: turn back
you’ll only live there with a broken heart - ’

asya has a hyper active mind and is forever questioning life’s many contradictions. she wonders how life can seem so distant when she has everything she seemed to have wanted:  married to the love of her life, studying exactly what she had dreamed of,  free of her familialal and societal restrictions. but the marriage she so dreamed of is doomed by her childish idealism and irrepressible questioning:

‘do you have reason to think he doesn’t love you?’
asya pauses. ‘ i believe,’ she says ‘i believe he believes he loves me. but it’s not something he thinks about. he decided back in march ’68 that he loved me and he hasn’t thought about it since.’

she is confused by only feeling alive in the presence of an uninspiring, selfish, english lover. a lover who nevertheless sexually touches places out of reach to her frustratingly respectful husband. she struggles with the separation of love and sex that she had unquestioningly combined in her young head and heart while she’s easily drawn into an adulterous relationship.

it’s a wordy book that revisits asya’s recurrent insecurities and anxieties and though a part of asya’s charming character at times you do feel like repeating her husband’s hated, oft-repeated dismissive  ’say it in a nutshell, princess’ phrase. the book will resonate with the world’s deliberaters over the doers, those who have wandered along similar thought-paths:

can it be that she has no feelings anymore? only meta-feelings? meta-feelings about her loss of feeling?  – meta thoughts. 

i watched ahdaf interview palestinian film maker najwa najjar (who directed the very missable pomegranates and myrrh) and now understand their kinship. both women are exploring and ‘outing’ female sexuality (usually hidden) in the middle east.

the book had particular meaning to me, convincingly introducing me to my parents’ formative worlds. lovingly recommended. 

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