Writing as a Revolution

The annual Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature awards ceremony, an event honoring creative Arab writers, was a double celebration this year. The event, held on December 11, was also the centennial of Mahfouz’s birth. The winner this year was not a writer per se: the 2011 award honored “the revolutionary creativity of the Egyptian people during the popular uprising that began on 25 January 2011.” But it stands to reason that good literature is always revolutionary, which is the very definition of Amina Zaydan, the 2007 Mahfouz Medal recipient. Zaydan is best known for her book Red Wine, which won her the Mahfouz Medal, for its powerful voice of a woman walking the boundaries of ethnicity and religion, struggling with a failed marriage and a shifting identity. Zaydan was born to be a novelist. She was 17 when she realized that despite her various interests in sports, art and dance, she was only capable of genuinely finding herself in writing. It all began on a train when she spied a handsome man through the window of a carriage on the other track. “I started imagining [what would happen] if we were introduced and how things would unfold. It didn’t happen and the train moved, but I still kept imagining the story in my head,” says Zaydan as a trace of a grin appears on her face. “I couldn’t let the idea go. I kept thinking of how the two trains went their separate ways and wondered if people could meet again; what could happen if [strangers] tried to get to know each other. I was thinking of all the alternative scenarios to the situation.” In Red Wine, the protagonist falls in love with a person who shares neither her religion nor language, mirroring Zaydan’s first inklings of literature on the train tracks. The book reflected Zaydan’s life in other ways as well. “When my friends who live outside of Egypt read it, they were really moved because they believed the character was very similar to me,” she says. “This made the book even more credible to them.” Zaydan was born in Suez, famed for its perseverance during the Tripartite Aggression by Israel, France and Britain in 1956, and the city would be a source of inspiration in her writings later. She submitted her first piece of creative musings to Suez’s Literature Club and was met with unexpected praise, she says with a calm demeanor that seems to encase a strong will. “I discovered that what I wrote was actually a story. What I wrote was a khatera [a narrative of thoughts] like anyone who writes professionally. They told me, ‘This is a real story, and you are a writer.’ This made me take things more seriously from then on.” Red Wine is set over four decades in Suez, the city Zaydan describes with passion reserved only for a hometown. Suez, she recalls, was “a beauty” before the city was neglected by the old regime. Its people, however, have retained their qualities of “strength and generosity” despite the poverty and decrepit state of the city. Currently a resident of Cairo, the novelist works in a civil service position and is a mother of two girls who she mentions several times during the interview, particularly in relation to her work. When writing, especially Red Wine, Zaydan is immersed in the world she creates, often alienating the ones she loves in the real world. Pausing in the middle of sentences, she recalls how she would stay in her room for days with papers scattered all around, struggling with ideas as she wrote Red Wine. Zaydan was fixated on the characters and events of her story, which, at some points, made her sympathize with her family having to deal with her changing moods. “The writer bears a lot of suffering — not only the suffering of his society but also worldly suffering which could sometimes be too much for the mind to endure. You always have that inner need to change the world. Writing drains you in a hard way yet in a beautiful way as well.” Her bold writing approach, particularly in when it comes to issues of gender and class, is what makes her works so unique. Zaydan discusses taboos freely and openly, saying that she seeks to challenge others and even her own weaknesses. A self-taught novelist, Zaydan views writing as a spiritual experience that can be understood by many. “I didn’t link writing with education or a job,” she says. “I likened it more to working on myself.” As she started writing Red Wine, Zaydan thought nothing of success. For her, the novel was a work crafted specifically for her; a piece that sought to speak to her inner self. She didn’t even really expect to attract a large readership, let alone win an award. “Winning the Naguib Mahfouz medal was an indescribable feeling, especially since I didn’t even think anyone would accept the novel for its complexity [...] When I went to the award ceremony, it felt like I was flying over clouds, particularly with the [praise] I received from the judges.” Fakhri Saleh, one of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal selection committee members, described Red Wine as “the novel of disillusionment par excellence,” according to Al-Masry Al-Youm coverage at the time. But it was not the first time Zaydan was recognized for her work. In 1994, she won first prize in a literary competition held by Gamal El-Ghitani’s Akhbar Al-Adab weekly literary newspaper for her short-story collection It Happened Secretly. The following year, it was chosen as the best short-story collection by the Cairo International Book Fair. Except for Red Wine, however, Zaydan’s work has not been translated to English.  Wrestling with the Industry Despite this undeniable success, Zaydan bears a heavy burden writers are forced to live with in Egypt if they want to be published. The writer’s face turns sad as she starts speaking of how writers are stripped of their rights in Egypt. “The writer could produce a book that may bring in thousands of pounds for the publisher, yet I may not have a clue about this. Publishers generally don’t even abide by the contracts they sign with writers, and there isn’t an entity the writer could go to protect his or her rights,” asserts Zaydan. According to Zaydan, a writer in Egypt typically handles the process of publishing a book, even if he or she has signed with a publisher — the burden of responsibility is on the writer. “We may even pay, but I promised myself that I would never pay for a book I wrote to be published.” Connections and popularity also play a big role in a novelist’s life, which Zaydan thinks is unethical. The media and publishers tend to over promote work that doesn’t live up to literary standards simply because the work is attached to a big name, she says, as the smoke of her cigarette lingers in the air. But even if good writing has been underrated for some time now, Zaydan’s passion for it and her faith in it will never fade. “The writer is the nation’s conscience, [the one] who can affect a nation’s behavior and let the citizen know his rights. Writing poses a threat to any authority. And not only the authority we had before the revolution, but the one after the revolution and then the one after it and so on. Writing is always a state of revolting. A revolution in itself.”