Cairo leading new wave in literature

Cairo is already a literature producing city, but it is more commonly associated with Arabic texts, and these pieces of literature are further associated with sweeping assessments of society, societal change, politics and religion on a macrocosmic level. Traditionally, there has also never been much of a local market for literature in Cairo or wider Egypt, leading to an old saying that books are written in Cairo, but published in Beirut and then read in Baghdad.

The new wave in writing is changing this, however. New authors on the scene, such as Hamdi Abu Golayyel, author of A Dog With No Tail, Hamed Abdel-Samad, author of Farewell to Heaven and Ahmad al-Aidy who wrote Being Abbas al-Abd, are changing Cairo’s publishing landscape, by moving away from tired politically-infused works, towards more personal, more intimate explorations of a single character, rather than an examination of an entire country or region.

There works are also not so religion or culturally centered, making them accessible to a wider redership outside Egypt, Aidy, for example, has had his book translated into Italian, English, Turkish and Dutch, and it can be found on the shelves of major bookstores as far afield as Amsterdam.

Aidy moved away from grand narratives and focused on a single character in a vein that one might call personal or social politics. His narrator, a video store clerk in Cairo comes into contact with Western culture everyday because of the nature of his job, he seems caught between a conservative society and a liberal, personal, desire for sex, and in the novel says “glory be to my favorite bar of soap”, which is not only an explicit reference to his regular masturbation, but also a risqué reference to an oft-used phrase in religious texts (“glory be to god”).

Similarly, Hamed Abdel-Samad’s Farewell to Heaven, explores the dark taboos of child molestation and rape, as well as homosexuality, his protagonist is a boy trying to recover from the trauma of systematic rape by the older boys in his village. While A Dog With No Tail by Abu Golayyel, tells the story of the intense contrast between the life of the city and that of the village, the divide between two countries within a country.

“My friends and I were almost completely shut out, walking the streets of Cairo like we were citizens of another, faraway country we yearn to go back to” his protagonist, a rural migrant to Cairo states in the novel. In this way, Golayyel explores the life of the peripheral, the so-called underclass who live in Egypt but are not treated as citizens of the same Egypt as the middle and upper classes.

These texts are examples of the ground-breaking work coming out of Cairo in recent years, and they represent a change in a country who politics and markets are trying to embrace the wider world. After so many decades of authoritarian leadership and conservative values, the literary industry in the capital city seems to be heralding a change in the country, and it is being positively received by the public, with many of the books gaining best seller status within Egypt.

The problem of a fickle market remains, however, with just ten thousand copies needing to be sold for a novel to be considered a best seller, but it is a step toward a different future and, excitingly, one that is less predictable to that which has come before.