Apologizing for my ignorance, I asked Regina G. Cooper of Alabama’s Huntsville-Madison County Public Library to explain the Big Read Program.
“We take a book each year,” she said, “and have everybody in the community read it and talk about it. We started off in Huntsville with The Great Gatsby. We figured it helped that Zelda Fitzgerald came from just up the road in Montgomery, Alabama. Second year we read To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s set in Alabama, and Harper Lee lives nearby.”
“So you keep things local.”
“Not at all. Last year we read The Maltese Falcon. There’s no Alabama connection. We thought a mystery might be more popular with men. Next year we’re doing Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner.”
“Why Mahfouz?”
“I don’t know. The National Endowment for the Arts chose the book, not us. That’s why we’re in Egypt.”
When Ibrahim Abdel Meguid entered the room, he didn’t stand on ceremony nor at a dais. He seated himself at the table with the rest of us. Big and fleshy, with curly silver hair, gold-rimmed glasses and an engaging smile, he was a man in his sixties, confident of his ability to win over strangers. Though his English was far from perfect, he never appeared frustrated not to be speaking his own language in his hometown. Friendly himself, he counted on the friendly attention of his audience.
He talked a bit about his best-known novel, No One Sleeps in Alexandria, and recited lines from the Federico Garcίa Lorca poem that was the source of its title. “No one sleeps in heaven/ No one sleeps in the world. / No one sleeps/ No one / No one.” Then he named the foreign writers who had influenced him. Among them he mentioned Durrell, which surprised me.
Set during roughly the same period as the Quartet, Meguid’s novel is generally regarded as a gritty corrective to Durrell’s lush, romantic vision of the city. Narrated from the point of view of poor Egyptians, No One Sleeps in Alexandria mixes realism and magic, religion and profanity, the folklore of northern and southern Egypt, rural and urban myths, Christian and Muslim theology. It quotes the Koran, the Bible, Durrell, Cavafy and Tagore, and in the style of John Dos Passos, it grounds the action in historical context by reprinting snippets from contemporary newspapers.
Inevitably, Meguid discussed the Cosmopolitan Era, which ended when Nasser seized power in 1956, nationalized the Suez Canal and expelled most foreigners. “The city was clean back then,” Meguid said, “and women wore Western fashions and there was café life and jazz music in the nightclubs. Now everything has changed. People come today and don’t find Alex; they don’t find a mythical city like Samarkand. It’s crowded with peasants from rural villages and people who return after working in the Persian Gulf and bring with them Wahhabi ideas. The city has lost its tolerance.”
When Justin Siberell announced that Meguid would answer questions, my instinct was to sink down in my seat. In my experience, Q&A sessions in North Africa can be skin-crawling embarrassments. Once, in Tunis, after I had lectured on Hemingway, a prim young woman in a headscarf stood up in front of a large audience of students and professors, and asked me, “Is it true in the United States, as I have read, that when a black woman has an orgasm she screams, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!’?”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know where to look. No Tunisian professor or U.S. Embassy official offered the mercy of intervention. I weakly muttered, “Where did you read that?”
“In a novel called Trailer Camp Women.”
“I’m not familiar with the book. Let’s talk about this later.”
At the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, however, the Big Read group tossed nothing but softball questions at Meguid, and once he grooved his swing, he could have gone on for hours had Justin Siberell not interrupted to say that a bus was waiting to take the Big Readers to the airport and back to Cairo. Profuse in their gratitude, they each gave Meguid a business card. This was a ritual popular throughout North Africa. Everybody handed out cards and expected them in return. When I apologized that I didn’t have a card, people looked at me as if I must be an imposter.
I invited Meguid to join me for tea and more talk about Egypt and literature. He suggested that we meet at the Cecil Hotel, and I assumed he was staying there too. But as we settled at a table in the lobby, he made it clear that he was registered at the Hilton in the Green Plaza Mall. “This place has good tradition,” he said of the Cecil. “But Green Plaza has more life.”
The city’s center of gravity was shifting in that direction, he said, out to the suburbs and the malls and gated communities. Although Meguid’s fiction has always been identified with Alexandria, he hasn’t lived there in decades. “When I publish my first short story,” he said, “I move right away to Cairo. I want to be at the center. I worked thirty years in the Culture Ministry because it gave me time to write.” Like many Egyptian artists, he had been a state employee until his retirement.
Did it rankle him, I asked, that Westerners, when they thought of Alexandria at all, knew the city through non-Arabic writers—Cavafy, Forster and Durrell.
“No, no.” His scorched cheeks creased in a smile. “The tradition here is to be open and tolerant to different views. You can find resentment, especially from the fundamentalists, about colonialism and foreign authors. But most writers appreciate other writers. I always look back to the era of Durrell and the other Europeans as a good time.”
“Better than now, when you have your own literature and identity as a nation?”
“In some ways, yes.” The waiter brought a plate of salted peanuts, and Meguid helped himself and poured more tea. “We had good schools back then. Small classes. Fifteen students. Now it’s seventy students. They taught English. They took us to the cinema. I saw Moby Dick and Gone With the Wind. Cinema was my guide. I read the novels afterward. I read Moby Dick as a Koran. The language is very deep. It has the taste of a religious book. I admire many American writers—Watt Whitman, Faulkner, Steinbeck. I read Tortilla Flat and it changed my life.”
Words spilled out of him, not wistfully, not ruefully, but with genuine pleasure at recollecting his youth and what, surprisingly, he regarded as the city’s golden age. His fondness for American and European mass culture, for even the kitschiest manifestations of colonial occupation, astonished me.
“Three magic things we had in Alex when I was a boy,” he said. “Cinema. Nightclubs for foreigners. And sailors coming into port. Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum were our heroes.”
“What about Nasser? What about Sayyid Qutb?” I asked about the godfather of modern Islamic radicalism.
Meguid gave a weary flick of the hand. “Nasser had Sayyid Qutb hanged in 1966 for subversion. That’s politics, not heroes. I used to be a good socialist. I was in the Communist Party. But when I went to Russia I saw it was a lie. This wasn’t the Soviet Union we dreamed of. It was corrupt. You couldn’t even find a photocopy machine. They thought it was a machine for spying.
“Then I lived eleven months in Saudi Arabia. I wrote a novel about it, The Other Place. I look on Saudi as a kind of hell. You can’t live in a city without music or art.”
“Do other Egyptians agree with that?”
“Some. The educated ones. In private they say what I do.”
“And the rest of the people?”
“We’re in crisis. We changed from socialism to capitalism. The government says they encourage capitalism, but it doesn’t want to accept capitalist practices like strikes and other freedoms. Our leaders don’t really believe in competition. They give one guy, a friend in politics, the import business. They give another friend the export business.”
A loud buzzer sounded. It might have been an alarm warning us that we were discussing forbidden topics. But no, it was Meguid’s cell