The Book Egyptian Earth - Essay Example

? Egyptian Earth A young boy in Cairo goes back home from his school and finds that his village has been torn by arguments and despair. The authorities allow the fellaheen (peasants) 10 days of water. This is barely enough but then news filters through that the ration is to be reduced to 5 days. That is, the peasants of his village had been ordered by their official to get done with the irrigation in their fields within five days while normally they took ten. “…the water had been cut off, and everyone knew it was the work of the Government, not of God” (Al-Sharqawi 63). Before this young boy, Alwani, had left his village for school there had not been any such situation. There was plenty of water for everyone. In fact, “the year before I went away to school we used to bathe in the small canal near the village, all of us together, boys and girls” (Al-Sharqawi 2). Now, this order shakes the whole village and it is obvious that the tiny village is disrupted. There is, however, one local schoolmaster, Sheikh Hassouna, who sees how wrong this is. He is a respected personality. Sheikh Hassouna keeps telling the villagers to get together and start a rebellion against the official. Many several attempts are made; some turn out to be extremely disastrous while others are comical and touching. Eventually they all get together and rebel against the corrupt oppressors. There are different interests for the Mayor, the wealthier landowners and the local bey (noble rank) and they conspire to maintain their own status so that the main burden falls on the fellaheen. The central conflict focuses on Abu Suweilim the most respected of the fellaheen, who has remained on the land while his two former comrades in the 1919 rising against the British have ‘progressed’ to positions in the town or in business and now carry the honorary title ‘sheikh'. “The village boys were whispering that Abu Suweilim had been quite right to warn against the Omda, and that Sheikh Yusif, Muhammad Effendi and Sheikh Shinawi were to blame…” (Al-Sharqawi 72). This novel was first published in 1954, just two years following the Egyptian revolution. Egyptian Earth was the artistic expression of a new ideological era. It highlights the ultimate bankruptcy of the system which had governed Egypt until 1952, and looks forward to new departures. The revolution of 1952 was proclaimed in the name of Abdul Hadi and his fellow villages, but although the plot of Egyptian Earth is actually set in the 1930s, during the Sidky dictatorship, there is perhaps an unspoken fear in the author’s mind that the new regime may repeat the mistakes of its predecessors. The book is surely a great piece of modern Arabic literature. The novel gained so much popularity that translations were made of it in several other languages, which include French and Russian. Besides, it was even turned into a very famous film directed by Youssef Chahine. This novel is set in a small village in Egypt in the 1930s during the British occupation of Egypt. It is a coming-of-age story of Egypt, set in the early 1930s, a period of intense disappointment and frustration of hopes for many Egyptians. For al-Sharqai’s contemporary audience, the events portrayed in this novel must have resonated strongly with the political and social context of Egypt at the time. Egypt in the wake of the 1952 revolution seemed similarly full of hope and promise for all Egyptians, particularly for the previously disenfranchised and most pointedly for peasants. If there were lessons to be learned by the audience of the 1950s from the events of the 1930s one of them had to be that it was wise to view such periods of promise with caution and even suspicion, and not with naive optimism. A repressive monarchy has been restored, parliament has been dissolved and the Constitution suspended. Much of Egypt is ruled by a combination of the local omdas (village headmen) and the British-controlled police and armed forces. The village of this novel is no different. The fellahin (peasants) are at the mercy of the repressive Omda, who feels free to steal their land and imprison them, virtually without reason. A new road is to be built, which will take much of the peasants' valuable farmland without compensation. Much of this novel is how the fellahin resist this oppression, told through the eyes of a schoolboy on holiday from his schooling in Cairo. The initial story is concerned less with the land grab than with Waseefa, an attractive young woman, who does not conform to standard convention in her flirtations. The boys are naturally interested, particularly as she is very attractive. She is the daughter of Abu Suweilim and is courted by a peasant farmer and by the educated son of one of the sheikhs. This proposal came after the young man, Alwani, realized how he was taking advantage of Waseefa. “It was as if I was trying to buy these moments of pleasure from her; I was as bad as those men who seduced poor girls in the magazine stories. I was bitterly ashamed” (Al-Sharqawi 29). Once the engineers come into the village, determined to restrict the amount of water the fellahin use for their irrigation, the problems really start. Al-Sharqawi tells the story with a mixture of humor and seriousness, as the fellahin squabble amongst themselves but, generally, work together to outsmart the Government forces and local authorities. The forces of evil are overcome - the Omda dies - and the villagers, more or less, win and our narrator heads back to school in Cairo to resume his education, having thoroughly enjoyed his summer. The reprinting of Desmond Stewart's 1962 translation of Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi's 1954 novel Egyptian Earth provides a weather vane indicating the growing interest on the part of English-speaking readers of modern Arabic literature. As more and more colleges and universities introduce courses on Arabic literature and include Arabic fiction in courses on world and non-Western literatures, the demand for translated works has grown dramatically. Egyptian Earth has entered the canon of modern Arabic literature as an emotionally impassioned yet literarily controlled articulation of sociopolitical criticism. Like Yahya Haqqi's Good Morning!, which also first carne out in 1954, this first novel by the Marxist al-Sharqawi warns readers of the dangers inherent in the new world order put into place by the 1952 revolution. Both Haqqi and al-Sharqawi immediately saw through the populist posturing of the so-called revolutionary regime. Each novel discusses the impact of the introduction of a modern transportation system into a village that has survived the millennia of foreign rule more of less untouched by the outside world. In Egyptian Earth the story revolves around the construction of a road. In Good Morning! the account is split between Yesterday, before the train passed through the village, and Today. Whereas Haqqi chose a deliberately anonymous allegory to reveal methodically and almost paradigmatically the problems and possibly negative outcomes, al-Sharqawi adopted a more standard strategy for discursive political criticism: historical fiction writing. Slipping back a couple of decades, he was able to criticize the new Egyptian tyrants as though he were criticizing British coercive practices. As Robin Ostle writes in his helpful foreword, Egyptian Earth is one of the first Egyptian works of literature to present the narrative from the peasants' perspective. This is of course also true of Good Morning! However, Haqqi is less totalizing in his delineation of rural Egyptians. He is more aware of class relations that complicate the notion of a romanticized, monolithic, and ultimately helpless peasantry in revolt against modernity, variously allegorized. Still, it is suspected that al-Sharqawi would not have thought of his characters as romanticized. The boy narrator, a native son and Cairo-educated, is fully aware of literary precursors to his experience; he mentions both Muhammad Husayn Haykal's Zaynab and Taha Husayn's book The Days. He situates his story in this tradition and makes a case for its greater realism and poignancy. Certainly we do read of multiple relationships and of individuals'--including women's--revolts against authority figures. However, the overall tone is uncomplicatedly binary. On the very last page, as the narrator is driven through the streets of Cairo after his return from spending the summer in the country, he hears the driver swear "in a way which I had not heard throughout the summer." Works Cited Al-Sharqawi, Abdel Rahman. Egyptian earth. Trans. Desmond Stewart. 2, reprint. the University of Michigan, 1990. Bardenstein, Carol. "Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi, Egyptian Earth. trans. Desmond Stewart." International Journal of Middle East Studies 25.4 (1993): 705-706. Cooke, Miriam. "Reviews the book `Egyptian Earth,' by Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi and translated by Desmond Stewart." World Literature Today 66.1 (1992): 196. Read More