Friendly Fire
Alaa Al Aswany
Translated by Humphrey Davies
To Abbas Al Aswany, my father, who taught me
Table of Contents
And We Have Covered Their Eyes
To the Air Conditioning Attendant of the Hall
An Old Blue Dress and A Close-fitting Covering for the Head, Brightly Colored
Mme Zitta Mendès, A Last Image
1
THE FIRST FILM SHOW IN HISTORY took place in December 1895 in Paris, at the Indian Salon of the Grand Café, on the Rue des Capucins. One year later, the cinema arrived in Egypt. The first film was shown in Alexandria in November 1896 in a hall owned by an Italian named Dello Strologo. This was a unique event in the life of Egyptians and foreigners living in Egypt alike, and the press of the day was filled with enthusiastic commentary on the new invention. Even the extortionate prices charged for tickets did not put people off. Showings lasted about half an hour and were broken up into a number of separate episodes, none exceeding a few minutes in length and consisting for the most part of scenes from domestic life, on the streets, in forests, and at sea. Despite the naiveté of the subjects and the primitive filming techniques, people were enthralled by cinema, paid for their tickets, and hurried into the screening hall, where they sat on chairs in rows waiting for the magic moment when the lights were extinguished, everything went totally black, and the scenes began to appear on the screen. No doubt, the pleasure felt by the first viewers as they watched real life on the screen for the first time was greater by far than our enjoyment today of the art of the cinema, despite which, that exquisite pleasure brought with it at the time a curious problem. The audience, in that state of extreme excitement that would seize them as they followed the film, would often become so engrossed in its events that they would imagine that what they were seeing was indeed real. Thus, if the sea appeared to be rough with high waves, they would feel terrified, and no sooner did a fast-moving train appear on screen, puffing thick smoke, than many would let out cries of genuine panic and rush to exit the hall, fearing that the train would crush them. When these unfortunate events were repeated Dello Strologo instituted a new tradition: he would wait for the audience members in front of the hall and accompany them to the screen. Then, taking it in his fingers, he would say, “This screen is just a piece of cloth, not much different from a bed sheet. The images that you are going to see are reflected on the screen and do not originate within it. In a short while, you are going to see a speeding train. Remember, gentlemen, that this is only an image of a train, and can therefore do you no harm.”
When we read of these happenings today, more than a hundred years later, the panic of the audience appears bizarre and laughable. Nevertheless, to this day, some readers of literature continue, most unfortunately, to make the same confusion between imagination and reality, and this is a problem from which I, like many other novelists, have suffered greatly. In my novel The Yacoubian Building, I presented two characters, Abaskharon and Malak—two brothers from a poor Coptic background distinguished by their craftiness, eccentricity, and vivacity. In the course, however, of their bitter struggle for survival, they are by no means above lying and stealing. After publishing the novel, I was taken aback to find a Coptic friend of mine telling me reproachfully, “How dare you present such a debased image of the Coptic character?” My response (which he found quite unconvincing) was that I hadn’t been presenting the character of the Egyptian Copt in general but that of fictitious characters who happened to be Copts in just the same way that the novel teems with corrupt Muslim characters, from which fact it was quite impossible to infer that all Muslims are corrupt. Likewise, in my novel Chicago, I present a character called Shaymaa, a young woman who wears the headscarf, has come from the Egyptian countryside to Chicago to be a student, and whose stay in America has made her rethink her conservative upbringing. Given that she falls in love with a colleague, with whom a physical relationship gradually develops, and that the novel was published in installments in the newspaper al-Dustur, I would receive a weekly dose of insults and curses from readers of extreme religious views because, in their opinion, by presenting as a character a young woman who wore the headscarf and had abandoned her principles, I had harmed the image of all Muslim women who wear the headscarf and, consequently, of Islam itself.
I thought long about the question, “What could drive an educated, intelligent reader to consider the behavior of a fictitious character in a work of the imagination an attempt to harm the image of religion or of a section of society?” To be fair, the responsibility for this confusion should not be placed entirely on the shoulders of the reader. On the contrary, it is connected by fine threads to the nature of literature itself, for two reasons. The first of these is that a large part of the pleasure of reading may be attributed to the fact that it gives power to our imaginations. We take pleasure in imagining the events of the novel and its characters in ways that suit ourselves. These imaginings cannot be realized