LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

jeff shalanfor in terms of the narrative perspective of the youthful protagonist, who maywell have experienced it in this spontaneous light, its textual significance –analogous to the text itself as the culminating achievement of this first phase ofcultural nationalism – can better be explained by first attending to the storyitself. For it is there that al-Hakim lays the figurative groundwork for, and fromwhich he forges, this renewed image of the Egyptian nation and its eternal spiritmiraculously reborn in the collective expression of a single moment.ÆAwdat al-ruh is set in a middle-class neighbourhood in Cairo where Muhsin,the 15-year-old protagonist, has come to study. Having left his parents’ estate inthe country, he now lives in a small apartment with his uncles Abduh, anengineering student, and Hanafi, an arithmetic teacher and the absent-mindedhead of the household; Zanuba, his illiterate aunt who was sent along to lookafter his uncles; their cousin Salim, a policeman temporarily relieved of duty forsome mysterious escapade with a Syrian woman; and Mabruk, a childhoodfriend and the servant of the household. In the house next door lives Dr Hilmi,a retired government employee, with his wife and their beautiful 17-year-olddaughter Saniya, who becomes the novel’s erotic centre of attention – drawingthe affections first of Muhsin, then Abduh and Salim, and finally Mustafa Bey,a neighbour of Turkish descent who has inherited a firm from his father but whospends most of his time at the local coffeehouse observing the others and beingobserved, in turn, by Zanuba. But like Haykal’s Zainab, Saniya is more than amere object of male desire. She is both a catalyst for the novel’s humorousportrayal of the male characters and, more importantly, the one who generatesthe narrative’s construction of, or movement towards, a national community, aswell as Muhsin’s aspiration to be its voice. And given the novel’s Pharaonicunderpinnings, Saniya’s character, much more so than her romantic counterpart,evokes a comparison with the mythical Isis, charged with the task ofresurrecting her dead and dismembered brother-husband, Osiris or, in this case,the Egyptian nation itself. But whether Saniya’s character can, in fact, supportthe symbolic weight of her role becomes, in turn, a crucial question for a novelwhose powerful rhetorical appeal for national unity derives from an allegoricalmeaning deftly woven into the fabric of the story. And, as I will go on to argue,by problematising the seamless appearance of this weave, Saniya’s figure raisesfundamental concerns about the nature of that appeal.The leitmotif of unity is announced at the start, as the ‘Prologue’ presents anisolated image of a national community writ in miniature. The five male membersof the household have taken ill, and when the doctor enters their home, hefinds them jammed together in a single bedroom. Why, he wonders aloud,did they put up with this crowding when there was room elsewhere in the apartment– the sitting room at least? … A voice which rose from the depths of a bed replied,‘We’re happy like this!’— 146 —www.taq.ir