LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

jeff shalanal-ruh is itself testimony to the rhetorical power of such action of the work of artwhich, as I’ve tried to suggest in this case, can in a quite literal and selfconsciousway write the nation into being. When the climactic moment of theinsurrection at last arrives, it is then perhaps more than coincidence that itbursts forth in the ‘season of creation’, since this ‘resurrection’ of the Egyptiannation is also the realisation of the young artist’s vision: the work of art itself.But in al-Hakim’s representation of the event, we can also see more clearly whatis at stake in an argument for national unity predicated not only on sacrifice buton the power of imagination and belief.It is the Frenchman’s opinion which the ‘[f]acts bore out’, a narrative factthat itself comes as no surprise at this point:Perhaps this archaeologist who lived in the past saw the future of Egypt better thananyone else … The Egypt that had slept for centuries in a single day arose to her feet.She had been waiting, as the Frenchman said, waiting for her beloved son, thesymbol of her buried sorrows and hopes, to be born anew. And this beloved was bornagain from the body of the peasant … Each group and band thought that it hadinitiated the uprising, in response to a flaming, new emotion. No one understood thatthis emotion had flared up in all their hearts at a single moment because all of themwere sons of Egypt, with a single heart … Fourteen million people were thinking ofonly one thing: a man who expressed their feelings, who arose to demand their rightsto freedom and life. He had been taken and imprisoned and banished to an island inthe middle of the seas. (272–3)Without question, Zaghlul’s banishment was the catalyst for the uprisings.But far from being a singular expression of anti-British nationalist sentiment,the popular uprisings were fuelled as much by diverse and contradictory currentsof internal discontent. By casting Zaghlul in the image of the nation’s ‘beloved’,expressing the hopes of one and all, the narrative effectively silences those otherdissenting voices – a gesture whose textual representation occurs at numerouspoints in the novel (the symbolic appropriation of the peasantry, which canfunction as an apology and indeed justification for exploitation, the demonisationof Muhsin’s mother, the rejection of Zanuba), but most notably in thisculminating displacement of Saniya as the ‘beloved’.In a sense, the terms of the narrative’s argument for unity make Saniya’sdisplacement inevitable, but not because the ‘beloved’ must be ‘born again fromthe body of the peasant.’ Rather, as Muhsin has shown, it is because there isfinally no way to reconcile oneself to the dilemma posed through Saniya’scharacter. Self-sacrifice cannot alone resolve the problem of the individual’splace in the community, and so it seems one can only imagine the dissolution ofthe problem by making its disruptive agent, like those dissenting voices,disappear. Interestingly, it is a relative outsider to the community who providesus with the final insight:— 156 —www.taq.ir