The House of Jasmine (17 page)

Shagara gets arrested for his participation in these demonstrations, but he is not convicted, most likely because of the testimony of the shipyard's chairman of the board of directors, who claims that Shagara only participates in the official rallies that show public support for the president. Shagara's participation in the demonstrations makes him realize that what legally vindicates him, morally incriminates him:

I had almost shouted out that I was really the one who incited all the demonstrators, that I was the one who pulled up the lamp posts, tore out the sidewalk tiles, burned transportation vehicles, night clubs, and police departments. I don't lead official rallies, as he said, but only cheat, and I've never even gone to any of them.

Shagara refuses to participate in the rallies that were organized for the reception of President Sadat upon his return from Jerusalem in November of the same year. His refusal is, at least partially, inspired by his realization that there is something honorable in the demonstrations opposing President Sadat's government and something dishonorable in orchestrating rallies in support of it.

The House of Jasmine
serves as a counter-narrative to the official history of the Sadat era. Besides telling a different story about Nixon's reception, it also portrays what Sadat and his state-sponsored media dismissed as an “uprising of thieves” and the minister of the interior claimed was the result of “attempts by hostile forces to spread rumors and incite the masses,” as instead a genuinely popular revolt by the Egyptian working class to defend its basic everyday needs. The January price hikes, which the government announced and then was forced to rescind because of the popular uprisings, were only part of a larger economic policy aimed at liberalizing the Egyptian economy. This policy had its beginnings in 1974, when Egypt received its largest loan from the IMF on the promise that it would privatize Egyptian industries and institutions that had been government-owned and -run under Nassir's government, to reduce government subsidies and other services, and to give private investment a free rein in directing the Egyptian economy. The result of these liberalization policies was a rapid concentration of wealth in the hands of the few and an increasing income gap. Egypt became a country of net imports and its main export became Egyptian labor, both skilled and unskilled. There is no indication in The
House of Jasmine that
Shagara understood any of this when he took to the streets with the workers from the shipyard. He probably didn't. He only had a gut reaction, an intuition that compelled him to be one with the protesting masses.

As part of its function as counter-history, the novel also provides an alternative narrative of how Egyptians received the news of Sadat's visit to Jerusalem in 1977, and the Camp David agreement of 1979, two moves whose popularity with the Egyptians were “proven” to the West through support rallies not different from those that received President Nixon a few years earlier. In its function as counter-history,
The House of Jasmine
is not alone. Much of modern Arabic fiction contains more truth than the region's official state histories, which have been produced during regimes that have traditionally enjoyed almost full control of the media. Particularly notable Egyptian novels that challenge the country's official historical narratives include Sonallah Ibrahim's
The Committee
and
Zaat
, Radwa Ashour's
Specters
, Ibrahim Abdel Meguid's
The Other Place
, Idris Ali's
Dongola
and
Poor
, Khairy Shalaby's
The Lodging House
, and Alaa al-Aswany's bestseller
The Yacoubian Building,
among others. Each of these novels, like
The House of Jasmine
, represents in its own way an era of corruption, political repression, and a systematic state effort to disseminate misinformation and falsify history.

The Sadat era was the precursor of Mubarak's rule, for, unlike Sadat, who reversed the general direction of his predecessor's policies, Mubarak followed in the footsteps of Sadat and continued many of his policies and practices throughout his thirty years of government. Readers of this English translation will be reminded of the rallies of “Mubarak supporters” that poured into the streets of Cairo after his maudlin speech on February 1, 2011, supposedly without promise of compensation, to counter Tahrir Square revolutionaries who continued to insist that Mubarak step down. They will be bemused at the way the state-sponsored media in 2011 attributed the anti- Mubarak protests to “hostile forces” and foreign provocateurs, almost exactly reproducing Sadat's official discourse on the 1977 bread riots.

Readers will also find that Shagara's account of his participation in the 1977 demonstrations could have been excerpted from any number of the accounts of the millions of Egyptians who participated in the 2011 demonstrations. It tells of the same feeling of unity that the protestors experienced in 2011. It recounts the violence initiated by the Central Police, and even includes many of the same slogans, chanted in 1977 and again more than thirty years later, calling for freedom, social justice, and a government that does not forge or falsify the attitudes and aspirations of the people.

Stendhal once wrote that “politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert,” yet Abdel Meguid's novella empties its gunload of politics into the narrative without disrupting its harmony or detracting from its merit as a work of literature. This is largely due to Shagara's narrative voice. Shagara has a good sense of humor, and the reader easily identifies with his shyness, sadness, and frustration, and with his modest wishes for a place to call home with a wife and child. His narration is often funny and never encumbered by political ideology or discussion, perhaps because he simply does not have any, but is only trying to make sense of a world that is rapidly changing and growing uglier by the day. He searches for simple beauties, a female face, a memory of a childhood romance, the scent of jasmine, and other small and fleeting pleasures. He is also disarmingly honest and often acts and speaks on impulse rather than after any serious deliberation.

The reader can partake of Shagara's bewilderment at a world he barely understands through the vignettes presented at the beginning of every chapter. These vignettes are independent of the main narrative and of each other, but are not unrelated. We may wonder whether the naked blond woman who comes back to life after being hauled out of the canal in a sack, and who then is futilely chased by the locals, represents President Nixon's promises of prosperity. Or whether the drunken dogs who proved faithful to their dead owner and his anti-imperial slogan are a contrast to President Sadat's government, which reversed Nassir's socialist and
non-alliance policies only a few years after his death. We may wonder long and hard and not arrive at a definitive interpretation. Yet while we wonder, we will also be laughing. In our puzzlement and laughter, we will be very close to our protagonist, Shagara Muhammad ‘Ali.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Mark Pettigrew and Jim Saliba for their helpful suggestions and edits to this translation. I am also deeply grateful to Hilary Plum at Interlink Publishing. Working with Hilary has been a pleasure and has certainly made this novel a better read. Thank you.

Noha Radwan