Joyce in Arabic

("James Joyce" in Arabic- or at least that's how I'd spell it!)

I am trying to work on a short oral presentation about James Joyce...in Arabic.

It’s not easy, especially when I spent much of yesterday in the gigantic Sayyida Zeinab mosque in south Cairo. (Interesting experience).

So if someone asked me what “Ulysses” is about? I’d take a deep breath, search my inner university memory for some pretentious phrases and let loose with something like...

“Well its Joyce’s masterpiece, a day in the life of a city and its inhabitants told in microscopic detail but in so doing the author sketches the outlines of the macro universe with his genius- it is the grand achievement of literary modernism, and with its utilisation of deep subjectivity and knowing narration, it serves as a death knell to classic nineteenth century realism and is the harbinger of much of what could be called post modern literature.”

After saying that (or something like that), I would sit back chuffed with myself, although pondering a little whether I actually understood all I said- or in fact does it make any sense at all?

But in Arabic- there are no such problems for me.

My vocab is limited in the extreme.

So in Arabic I could maybe just about say...

“ “Ulysses” is about a day in the life of 3 people from Dublin- a Jewish man Leopold , his wife Molly and a young writer called Stephen.”

Actually reading back on that, maybe the restricted vocabulary serves as a good discipline, because the second description is far more accurate and less weighed down with bull :)

(My attempt at writing 'Ulysses' in Arabic)

As it happens there is a student in my Arabic school who is half Irish, half Egyptian. The first time I met him a couple of weeks back, within a minute I found out his mother was from Sandymount- and 30 seconds later he quoted from 'Ulysses', “Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount Strand?”...obviously this is not completely typical of conversations I have with Irish people abroad!

But it was nice to briefly mention Joyce on the west bank of the River Nile (I actually discussed Joyce with a protester in the West Bank, Palestine once, but that is another story which I’ve written about before).

Anyway Cairo in 2012 is as far away from Joycean Dublin as I could possibly imagine. And I've briefly missed living in my city this weekend with its friendly faces... so on this overcast Saturday afternoon it’s nice to look at this short extract from John Huston's adaptation of Joyce’s “The Dead”. (You Tube clip at the end).

The final internal monologue is changed a little bit from Joyce’s final few paragraphs in the story.

But still they are among the greatest four or five paragraphs ever written- utterly intimidating and heart breaking in their sweep from the particular to the universal in just a few lines.

I suppose I have to concede that theoretically there could be some writing, somewhere in the universe, more breathtaking than the final passages from “The Dead”, but it is hard to visualise. Kind of like attempting to visualise infinity or eternity......oh hang on, Joyce did visualise that along Sandymount Strand.

The finale of “The Dead” is one of the reasons why every Irish writer trembles (or least should tremble) anytime they pick up a pen, or tap out the first few letters on their lap-top.

How could you not sweat buckets with this guy sitting on top of the national literary canon behind you?

The final scene of John Huston's "The Dead", adapted from James Joyce's masterpiece

Love in "The City of the Dead"

(My local flower store in Dokki...you have to go elsewhere if you want to pick up a bright red Camel, with hearts for humps ;))

Valentine’s Day is not so big in Cairo- at least compared to home.

You can buy flowers, cards and even stuffed red camels with hearts for humps in some local stores- but walking down Talaat Harb in Downtown Cairo this morning, there were not all that many people wandering around with roses in their hands.

I did not witness many overt displays of romance on Tahrir Square either, only the remaining revolutionaries, camping out with grim determination under their flags denouncing the military leadership.

But last night, I did experience a perfectly formed example of...well...love... and it came from Cairo’s infamous ‘City of the Dead’

I attended a screening of the new documentary film “The City of the Dead” (You Tube trailer at the bottom) in the Italian Institute last night. It’s a charming look at the lives of ordinary people in the “largest necropolis” in the world. Well over 100,000 people (the exact number is debated- some say 1 million) are said to live their daily lives in the Northern and Southern cemeteries in Cairo. They live in the tombs of the dead, sometimes renting them from the family of the deceased. They live, shop, marry, educate and die among the hundreds of thousands of graves.

The location is infamous in this city. When I told an open minded young Cairene that I was planning to visit the “City of the Dead” before Christmas, she baulked.

“Why do foreigners always go and visit there? When I am near I just run past,” she said.

The fact that tens of thousands of people live essentially in a cemetery, gives a glimpse into the vast social and economic inequality in this city, the years of neglect under the Mubarak and previous regimes- and most sobering of all – the gargantuan task that confronts any progressive post revolutionary government here to meet the desire for “social justice” that was part of the recent revolution.

However, the Sérgio Tréfaut directed documentary does not deal with the socio-economic reasons behind the existence of “The City of the Dead”. Rather, he takes its existence as a given, and explores instead the more meta-physical impact living among the dead has on the city’s inhabitants.

I think it works.

Obviously most of us have faced, and will certainly face in the future, death of loved ones, but in reality, in the developed world, death is not an ever present fact facing us down at ever turn.

For the inhabitants of the ‘City of the Dead’- death is everywhere, all the time.

As a local woman says in the documentary, "Living so close to death is bound to bring wisdom."

But back to love.

The star of the film for me is an elderly man (maybe in his 70s?) who has lived in the “City” all his life. He talks with pride of the place, arguing people should not be ashamed to live among the dead.

“With time we all turn to dust dear, didn’t God make us from dust” he says.

“We turn back to dust.”

But this man has already built the tomb he is to be buried in. He could not build it beside his dead wife’s grave, and his children objected to him moving his wife’s remains. So he built it as close as he could to her final resting place, in a corner where he could still “see” his wife.

He proudly shows the camera his tomb.

“Do you miss your wife?” the director asks.

The man goes silent for moments.

“We were together for decades not years. Decades,” he says sighing.

“What was she like?” the director continues probing.

With this the elderly man stares into the camera.

I was expecting him to say something like “she was a great mother to my children”, or “she was a dutiful wife” or she “was loyal”- all reasonable statements, but conservative in their own way. Expressions that you might expect to hear from a man of his age, and from the culture he is in.

But his eyes flare up.

“When I met her first she was a revolutionary!”

He then recalls her role in Egypt’s revolutionary past many decades ago.

His face is bright with respect.

The vision of his wife that he imagines first- is not as an unequal partner in a marriage, nor as just the mother of his children- it is as an independent lady, a revolutionary that he respected and loved.  It’s this separate person that he fell for- who still passionately burns in his memory.

It’s this vision of independence that he holds of her- across the many decades that have passed in between.

Egypt is a pretty patriarchal place, yet the role of the women’s movement in the revolutionary wave over the past year has been vital. It’s hard to say what will happen- but I think we can say broadly that the revolution will be good for “women’s liberation” in Egypt in the medium to long term. Certainly many of the most tenacious of the revolutionaries in Tahrir have been women and I think this reflects an understanding that the advancement of their sex, is linked to advancement of the revolution. Certainly any counter revolution- would be crushing to what exists of the “women’s movement” here.

Also there have been the pleasant phenomena of weddings taking place in Tahrir Square over the past year!

There are obviously numerous arguments in favour of the fight for equality- from the fundamentals of feminism, to first principles of Human Rights to (the one I’m most sympathetic and it's linked to the previous two) ethics based on socialist solidarity. There are others of course.

However on this day dedicated to Love (ok... ok, I know it’s a corporate inspired event blah, blah, blah !)- I like to think the fight for sexual equality can be justified on those grounds as well.

Because like the old man in the “City of the Dead” with his heroic visions of his revolutionary wife from decades ago , true love surely cannot exist in a situation of inequality- and can only thrive in an atmosphere of egalitarian respect.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Trailer for "The City of the Dead"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nPaBCvua348