Al-Balda al-Ukhra: a meta-text unveiled.

Ibrahim Abd al-Maguid, a rising star on the Arab literary scene, was awarded the American University in Cairo 1996 prize for his novel Al-Balda al-Ukhra (The Other Village), a work that is as moving as it is cerebral, as poignant as it is daring. A tale of epic proportions, heavily allegorical, it is narrated in the first person. A tour de force, this work will prove to be a landmark in contemporary Arabic fiction. In January of 1997, Abd al-Maguid was recognized for La Ahad Yanam fi al-Iskandariyya (No One Sleeps in Alexandria), by receiving Jai'zat al-Dawla al-Tashji'yya. Writing about the Gulf, the life experiences as well as the seismic changes that are challenging this pivotal part of the world have been successful in Abd al-Rahman Munif's Mudun al-Milh, (Cities of Salt) a classic of the genre. Others have written memorable works; for example Gamal al-Ghitani, Yusuf al-Qaid, and Iqbal Barraka.

Abd al-Maguid, however, gives us a tale of mythic proportions couched in the human drama of the daily life of hundreds of "foreign nationals," or those euphemistically labeled as "guest workers" throughout the Gulf countries. Although there have been numerous sociological studies conducted in the past decades attempting to asses the status of foreign workers, their impact on the host societies, as well as on their own, they have not told enough about the inner workings, and true suffering of these people. Aside from the vital remittances they transfer to their respective countries, which in some cases constitute the backbone of these third world economies, not enough research has been undertaken to measure how the individual is impacted by such an experience.

Ibrahim Abd al-Maguid's Al-Balda al-Ukhra is an extraordinary document that sociologists, anthropologists as well as political scientists, will, I am sure, find most useful. This richly textured narrative is delivered in the most denuded of prose. The factual yet elegant language is delivered in a naturalistic mode that often surprises us with its gripping poeticness. Abd al-Maguid, in recreating this imaginary yet so real world, carves for himself a lasting place amongst leading Arab writers. In three hundred and eighty seven pages divided into thirty chapters printed on butcher's paper (thick) with an unassuming white and blue cover with a sketch of two hands extended to each other but not touching, one holding what could be an apple, this is a work that was first published in London in 1991 and was dedicated to 'Fatima.' We encounter some truly unforgettable characters, witness incredible happenings and are moved by the turmoil and sufferings of this multiracial motley crowd temporarily thrown together for the sole purpose of making enough money to send back remittances to their families and eventually to return to their countries throughout the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Europe and America.

Edward Said in Beginnings.' Intention and Method states: "A text distributes various textual intentions regularly and on several axes, what unifies these intentions or impulses is something very difficult to generalize about." (p. 220)

This work indeed operates on several axes. However, I believe the pivotal axis for Abd al-Maguid is a burning desire to write. The meta-text is the author's agonizing search for the true self, the confrontation with what every artist/creator undergoes in the quest after the 'holy grail' - the creative impulse. It is in a sense, a Pilgrim's Progress.

Will I become once more a shining surface (mirror)? It is incumbent upon me to know everything about what I witness. To look at details like a well seasoned consumer . . . and begin to write a diary, memoirs, that will render what happens to me, not really happen to me. For memoirs entail a state of consciousness which in turn defeats intuition . . . then I will not be beset with sorrow. If I could only remember who that cunning author is who wrote these words? . . . Ah, all writers are cunning and mostly all readers are not smart enough when they start believing them and proceed to live out lives not their own. A (cold) calculated theft of their precious time and lives, and yet no one complains. It was said that when Goethe wrote The Sufferings of Wherter, hundreds of young romantic Germans committed suicide at a time when Romanticism ruled supreme in Germany, and where Napoleon had previously plundered its youth in war with his armies, yet it was Goethe by means of a small book who decimated the youth of Germany. . . . Lorca's poetry hadn't also saved the soldiers of the Republic, although they had carried them in their pockets next to their hearts. During my last visit to Cairo, Salah Mansour (read Abd al-Sabbur?) he who had piercing eyes was said to have collapsed in his bed after enunciating Hamlet's famous soliloquy.

As soon as he had uttered "to be or not to be" he fell into an eternal sleep. I wonder how many Shakespeare has killed through his handsome Prince in the last five centuries . . . and why should I go that far? I, Ismail Khidr Moussa, who is always searching for the truth and is always behind at grasping reality, I too have been misled by Ahmad Akef and Naguib Mahfouz. I believed in them and trusted them and killed Amal. Yes, it was a premeditated execution. I perhaps knew better what Ahmad Akef couldn't have known earlier on. I didn't want to engage in exhausting my own heart and those of other mortals. Ironically I succeeded in the first, but failed miserably in the second. I had read hundreds of books for the sake of learning how to write. I had read all except Al-Adab al-Katib, Al-Kamil, and Al-Bayan wa al-Tabyyin.

I let the [art] of writing flit away from my heart to the soles of my feet unto the ground to be treaded upon by forgetfulness and have rust cover it. Could this be my destiny? Or have I come here so far away to discover the reason and meaning of my existence? My God, thousands of miles away from all that had moved my heart, Here and Now I discover that yes, I can go back and WRiTE [emphasis added]. But I have no wish to have my heart bleed again. For I am my own writer and I am my own reader, I will therefore be without doubt my own killer. . . (p. 362)

Abd al-Maguid, like all writers agonizes about the act of writing, his wrenching cry from the heart is without doubt that wound which does not heal until he actually produces the narrative, Al-Balda al-Ukhra.

In embarking on this odyssey, the narrator/writer dramatizes the historical structure, which enables us to partake of his point of view (Macherey, p. 113). In reflecting on a "shinning" surface, he establishes what Pierre Macherey suggests: "The relationship between the mirror and what it reflects is partial. The mirror selects, it does not reflect everything" (p. 120).

Pierre Macherey proceeds to add: "The selection itself is not fortuitous, it is symptomatic, it can tell us about the nature of the mirror . . . Thus the image of history in the mirror will not be a reflection in the precise sense of a reproduction or facsimile" (p. 121).

"The notion of the mirror takes on a new meaning once it is supplemented by the idea of the analysis which defines the partiality of its reflections. But the analysis is itself deceptive since it tends to suggest that the real is the mechanical product of a montage. It must be interpreted in a way that does not sacrifice its real complexity. In actual fact it is not enough to say that the mirror catches a fragmented reality, the very image in the mirror is itself fragmented" (p.122). Ultimately, Abd al-Maguid like Conrad sees "everything in the tormenting framework of the writing life" (Said, p. 234).

"La solitude me gagne, elle m'absorbe. Je ne vois rien, je ne lis rien. C'est comme une espece de tombe, qui serait en meme temps un enfer, ou il faut ecrire, ecrire, ecrire." [Solitude overtakes me, absorbs me. I see nothing, I read nothing. It is some kind of tomb which at the same time is a kind of hell where one must write, write, write] (Macherey, pp. 122). We can safely deduce that the intense experiences lived in this work as well as their poignancy refract the agonies of the author's attempts at creativity.

In my room I stood with the notebook where I registered the letters, I actually wanted to register the number of mice I had killed and to write: Today is the 26th of March 1979 . . . the room engulfing me grew bigger and bigger and it was as if some cool refreshing water was being poured onto my chest. Why don't I start writing my memoirs today? Writing my diary will make of me a third person, I could then see with an eye that doesn't weigh down the heart with pain and suffering. . . . Who was that cunning author who wrote those words I once read somewhere, I cannot recall, besides I do not really care, I must turn to my work (p. 330).

These interludes about the intense need to write, reflecting upon the creative act of writing are astutely yet discretely interspersed throughout a text that is otherwise richly layered with intricate events, and strange happenings that border on the absurd if not the hallucinatory. It is as if the act of writing would be the centering act that would help maintain the sanity of the narrator. Even in his flashbacks about that very first love, Amal, whom he could not commit to and who killed herself in desperation, what he vividly recalls of her was her interest in him as a budding writer. "Why don't you show me what you have written? I answered then, 'I don't think I will continue writing'" (p. 235).

The allegorical dimensions of this narrative are cleverly carried through the names of most of the protagonists. One is struck by the choices of names. The narrator/author is Ismail Khidr Moussa, thrice a prophet, the seer who "sees," who is also the sacrificial lamb. . . . Ismail (he had accepted, to go to Saudi Arabia to raise money to be able to provide decent dowries for his unmarried sisters, and later to provide medical expenses to his sick and dying mother. For he was to fulfill the "unfinished business" of his dead father. Khidr, the wise one, and Moussa, a leader of his people.

Wadiha, the Saudi young woman, clear and pristine in her determination to find love, who stands erect unflinching when paraded in an effort to shame her for having dared to exchange feelings with a Yemenite who is subsequently deported after prison and torture. Wadiha clear in her mission, does not hesitate to kill, and to commit suicide when forced to marry a seventy year old man, and when she cannot live to love.

Names can also have ironic reversed meanings, such as Amal, the first 'hope' that was never to be. Nabil, the not so 'noble' or honorable young man who thought he was under a protective spell and that all who harmed him eventually paid with their lives. Nabil's belief in the existence of flying saucers, and extra terrestrial beings, and his fear that these saucers would damage his already collapsing home in Imbabbeh, the most wretched of Cairene suburbs, overpopulated and infested with all the evils of sickness, neglect and poverty lends an aura of mystery to the discourse. He always repeated that his mother used to say he "was protected by Allah." He ultimately betrays the trust put in him by his employer when he embezzles money from the safe and he finds disaster when his premonitions about his final departure from Tabouk are fulfilled. The final departure is interrupted when the plane turns back after take off because his thievery has been discovered. He returns to face his destiny of torture, imprisonment and ultimate punishment.

Al-Sayid al-Gharib, the estranged doctor, is also on that same final flight and would have rotted under house arrest had not a Saudi colleague found him and remembered that they had been to the same medical college in Cairo, and used his influence to release him. He had been wrongly accused of sedition, the fate of many such "strangers' in this land.

Mansur, the demented Saudi who runs around with a monkey on his shoulder named 'little Mansur' is "victorious" to the extent that he took his revenge on a society that had no compassion for the likes of him. When in a final act he serves the eiders of his tribe, the shaykhs, a beheaded monkey and lizards at a banquet he threw in their honor, an act of madness that echoes the disjointedness within his society. His unequited love for Widad (the heart) brings his madness to a head . . . after which he is committed to a mental asylum. He is the only one who curses the discovery of "oil" in the whole narrative and its consequences. Aida, the mature love of Ismail, is perhaps the only hope of a "return," though she refuses to commit herself in a relationship until her paraplegic brother is cured. One can elaborate more on the plethora of characters in this richly laden work, even speculate on some of the foreign names of Pakistanis or Indians.

If beginnings of narratives are indications of the intentions of writers let us consider al-Balda al-Ukhra's inaugural lines: "The door of the plane flew open and I saw 'the silence.' It is a rare thing to feel all over one's back the draft of cool air from the A.C. while one's face and chest meet the sun. No sooner had I stepped down from the small stairway and my feet had touched the ground, I felt the space around me, and the ground beneath me and I were one, flushed and void" (p. 9).

From the very start the gender worlds are unequivocally defined and clearly laid out in two separate spaces. The customs officer gives his stem commands that women were to stand in a separate line from the men. Even Rose Marie, the American who is shamelessly aggressive and almost succeeds in seducing and compromising Ismail in her husband's scare to defraud the Saudi employer, is a woman 'apart.'

The ensuing events and incidents that involve women, particularly native women, are reenactments of the strict separation between those two worlds. Though women are confined to a private space that has to remain inviolable, Ismail dares at least in his mind to transgress ironically at the foot of one of the holiest of places, the Haram al-Sharif. The irony as he notes elsewhere, is that on the pilgrimage, women are free to uncover their faces, as men should be in a state of grace, and lust should have no place in their hearts.

I felt perturbed by the women's movements in front of al-Haram. Many are those who enter through the doors and exit with uncovered faces. Green eyes, blue eyes, black eyes. As one can recognize men's nationalities from their looks and dress, here one can recognize the women from their eyes. Those young, fresh faces were flowers floating on light. Through the black abaas I could see red, white, green corsages, full of mystery. I couldn't get myself to lift my eyes to the heavens, or lower my gaze to the ground, my eyes remained at the same level of the eyes, cheeks, and faces of the women. Omar Ibn abi Rabii'a was indeed no madman, when he went on the Hajj to flirt with women. I wonder what would happen if I were to go to Mecca.(May God forgive me). What can I do about those eyes that steal you away from yourself, and the serenity these faces infuse the soul with, I am floating on a bed of mercury . . . . "(p. 166)

Ismail our protagonist sees for the first time Wadiha, who will subsequently become his lover, being paraded in shame standing erect shrouded in black from head to toe, next to a soldier, both riding an open half truck throughout the center of Tabouk, the godforsaken town scene of the action in this novel. The frenzied, brass- buttoned uniformed soldier shouting at the top of his voice in a deafening microphone, "Wadha bint Sulayman, bin Sabil, the pupil from the Aziziyyah Middle School, used to leave alter school with Bin Abdallah al-Yami, the Yemenite and go to the deserted road of Taynia. Al-Yami has not raped her, but because of her terrible deed, she has been expelled from school. Al-Yami is in prison for three months, after which he will be deported forever."

This scene, reminiscent of such medieval classics as "le retour de Martin Guerre," or to a puritanical branded scarlet letter to publicly shame this young transgressor sends, chills up the onlooker's spine. The narrator captures this determining moment with great astuteness. He notes the reactions of the different ethnic groups and their demeanor with perceptiveness. "While Egyptians loitered in front of pie sellers, Americans were drinking al-baarid, cold drinks, making sure that their left hands remained on their hips . . . and wearing their dark sunshades. I was surrounded by goods and sounds of recorders, out of which came confused and discordant sounds. I could still smell charcoaled meat, and on the street I could see no women, not one." (p. 32).

These low-keyed, well studied comments are the more powerful in their resonance. The comments seemingly uncalculated, are extremely powerful in their indictment.

"O God help me see her face. She stood immobile, not even swaying with the movements of the driven truck. While the ape-like soldier went on in his diatribes and accusations. . . . "(p. 32) "I followed (with my eyes) the black 'abaa, the body trembling, alive she must be, not dead. People went about their own business, and the cars resumed their movement, and the dancers from alf layla wa layla were back distributing the cups and the motorcades (caravans) of Shahrazad were led by young boys and ghulman followed by tambourines and banners . . . and the Koreans resumed their laughter, while the Indians walled upright, and the Pakistanis smiled reflecting in their eyes the sun rays, while the elderly Afghans opened wide their mouths in bewilderment" (p. 33).

These hallucinatory passages, surrealistic in their essence and narration, succeeded in giving this story its mythical dimensions. This is a narrative written with intelligence and compassion, for his sense of outrage is real and poignant but never abrasive. In his exile he is forced to explore the cultural forces that shape his society both in his own country and in his temporarily adopted one. He came like thousands from his part of the world, and indeed all five continents, in search for presumably a better income and a hope for better living conditions for his siblings. He was to work as a translator of Arabic/English, in a sense a cultural broker, trying to bridge differences, ultimately not only between East and West, but between East and East and establish lines of communication between those 'alien' nations.

Unlike the vast majority, he had come not so much to save with the intent of getting married and getting a good head start in life. He was here to satisfy the immediate needs of his sisters and mother. "I only came here for a short time. So let me be the mirror upon whose surface realities will glide" (p. 41).

Since he arrived he was made acutely aware of the importance of feminine presence. "I reach out desperately for ads that portray women. Alas no women are shown in low cut dresses in spite of the hundreds of ads of Swiss watches, French perfumes, Italian furniture, British castles, and Singapore Airlines. Women I hadn't really thought about them, yet somehow this must be the real reason why I came here. I came for the 'lie' my father has burdened me with, for one day I must immerse myself into the sea of women. I lost more than one heart. I lost a great heart . . . what a fool I am" (p. 41). His initial resistance to viewing pornographic movies, was soon overcome by his longing for women. Women are another pivotal axis within this narrative. The many women whose hearts he had broken as a young student, Amal his fellow student who took her own life in desperation. Wadiha the branded Saudi student, who takes him as a tutor since she had no right to continue in regular schools. Their fatal attraction and her subsequent tragic ending, when she is reported to have killed her seventy year old husband and herself. Ismail reads her cries for help in local newspapers when she resorted to communicating with him through "letters to the editor," asking for advice and consolation. And Aida, the love of his life, whose own tragic life and circumstances made of them star crossed lovers. He wished himself a mirror, and a mirror as Macherey notes: ". . . endows an object with new proportions, studies objects through other objects which are not quite the same." (p. 134) "The mirror extends the world but it also seizes, inflates and tears that world. In the mirror the object is both completed and broken: disjecta membra. If the mirror constructs, it is an inversion of the movement of genesis, rather than spreading, it breaks. The images emerge from the lacerations" (p. 143).

It is the lives of these "guest workers" as well as the microcosm they find themselves incarcerated in that Ismail Khidr Moussa attempts to reflect. 'Tabouk will not sleep tonight. Three Saidiis (Upper Egyptians) have killed their boss, over a month ago. They cut him up in pieces, and poured him into the concrete mixer., the body must have disintegrated. The crime was only discovered today. They were arrested, after which they confessed, though one of them was taken to the emergency because of the torture, and he lies there between life and death" (p. 145).

The succinct and economic matter-of-fact narration of such violence permeates this narrative. The Dantesque Inferno that is Tabouk, this 'heart of darkness' where the narrator seems to emerge crying "the horror, the horror" is burdened with an awesome legacy. Tabouk was believed to have been inhabited by a tribe that was cruel and inhospitable to the Prophet. Legend has it that they had prohibited him and his armies from having access to food and especially water during his battles. It is believed that the Prophet had then put a curse on the tribe until the end of time. Their number would never exceed twenty, men, women and children, so for every new born, one member of the tribe would die. A kind of zero population growth. "Tabouk Tunsilk Umak wa Abouk . . . went the saying. Once there, one was made to forget all else. . . . Five years are more than enough to remain in a country not yours, and here . . . it is like a big prison. Yes, you may be allowed to visit other people and to move around, but all remains the same, no new mornings, no new evenings" (p. 42). The recurring nightmares of the narrator, sometimes intermingle with his reality; "I saw myself retreating slowly, and four black men came towards me, they had bulging eyes, each eye rolling like an egg, each carrying a whip. I felt trapped, and they pushed me against a basalt wall, like a citadel, very slowly they beat me."

A scene that seems to be re-enacted in reality when toward the end of the narrative he takes a trip back to Egypt to settle some business (the money scam perpetrated by Larry and Rose Marie), and he is indeed mugged by two men in a dark alley in Alexandria and miraculously survives their barbaric beatings.

The other nightmares and premonitions he has about his mother's death, or the fear of being caught and disgraced because of his forbidden love of Wadiha are all part of the cumulative effects that make this otherwise 'realistic' narrative, reverberate with mythical and archetypal dimensions. Through the mediation of the 'other,' Al-Balda al-Ukhra, by resorting to a factitious experience, the author/narrator can only save himself from these ordeals by leaving everything and every hope of love (Aida), but presumably is redeemed by 'writing' himself in the narrative. It is as if by the mediations of these 'others' that he can reconcile himself with the rest of humanity. "I never thought about whether Sayyid al-Gharib (that estranged other) was lucky . . . I only thought about how people in Tabouk knew everything and I knew nothing" (p. 83).

If the fable seems to end with loss and dispossession on a material level, yet on a spiritual level the 'demons' have been exorcised and the spirit is intact.

AUTHOR's NOTE

This essay was written after I had visited Saudi Arabia in May 1997. In re-reading and researching this narrative it was impossible not to re-think the experience of those extraordinary encounters with Saudi academics, women and men, the state-of-the-art universities, libraries and research centers, hospitals at the cutting edge, the amazing infrastructure, and above all the interfacing with "guest workers," a counter text to the above context and meta-text.

WORKS CONSULTED

Ibrahim Abd al-Maguid, Al-Balda al-Ukhra, London and Cairo, 1991. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, Routledge, London, 1978 Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, Basic Books, New York, 1975 Terry Eaglton, Against the Grain, Essays 1975-1985, Verso, England, 1986. Umberto Ecco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of the Texts, Indiana University Press, 1986.

Mona N. Mikhail is a professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at New York University.