A review by Soumar Shehade for Diffah, October 1, 2017
In her novel Akhielet Al-Zéll (Dar Al-tanweer, 2017), the Egyptian writer Mansoura Ez-Eldin turns to imagining reality through a series of assumptions that do not strip the story of its realism, but rather view it through the lens of imagination. In an experimental style that makes the reader a partner in creating the text—either by giving the illusion that they are part of a cohesive team of narrators, or by presenting a fragmented story that comes together in their mind according to their interpretations and the reverberations of their personal crises—this type of writing is not only a test for the author but also a revelation of the reader’s self. The novel, which engages with various forms of art, features protagonists who are writers, with musicians and painters at the margins; it appears as if echoing ancient massacres and dispossessed societies, where individuals do not forge their own fate but have it shaped by others. Between fear and desire, the desolation of abandonment and the will to live or forget, between pure betrayal and the vigilance of suspicions, Akhielet Al-Zéll illuminates borrowed lives burdened by disappointments and trajectories shaped by them.
The novel begins from a wooden bench in a garden near Prague’s Charles Bridge, through a dialogue between a plump woman staring at the space between her feet and a man gazing at the ground with a frown. They meet during a visit to the Kafka Museum: Camellia, a writer from Cairo, and Adam, a writer from Seattle, along with Olga, a Russian writer who inhabits Camellia’s consciousness and whose presence Camellia and Adam see on her computer screen. The writer attributes the trajectories of her protagonists to knots originating in childhood; the fates of many characters represent painful, unconscious reverberations of experiences inflicted upon them or those into which they fell while still forming psychologically. At the age of five, Camellia was kicked by her father; she writes to understand this event from her childhood, turning her writing into a justification for the emotional blows she has suffered throughout her life. Meanwhile, Adam dreamed of becoming a writer ever since reading a story by Lovecraft. In a dark basement, he learned that the way to overcome fear is to surrender to it, which led him, afraid of his own shadow in the bathtub, to write about a “city of fear” resembling a land haunted by shadows. The basement instilled in him a phobia: an inability to satisfy women and the belief that impatience and anger are constant traits of women in intimate situations, stemming from a humiliating experience with an older girl.
Camellia visits Adam after hundreds of emails. At his house, while Rose is busy pushing an empty swing, Camellia finds Adam changed. The narrator then introduces a third childhood trauma related to his wife, where Rose lost her sister while playing and hid this truth, which destroyed her ability to have children. Camellia believed Adam was using her to create excitement in his married life, only to realize that his wife still faces the unanswered question: “Did I push the swing too hard?”—a question that does not change the fact that one fatal fall ended two lives.
The chapters unfold with Ez-Eldin alternating between telling the stories of the three writers through their own perspectives. Olga narrates Adam’s story, beginning with Amidia, his grandmother, who survived the “Sevo” massacre of Syrians and Assyrians. She recounts Camellia’s story after Adam and Camellia have shared their lives with each other, in a smooth and spontaneous manner. Dulut names her daughter after an actress who acted alongside Ahmed Salem. Yet the girl is subjected to her mother’s scorn, who continuously signals to her daughter that the remaining heirlooms of their family are more important than she is. During one evening, Camellia neglects a fire that ignites her hair, and Munir covers her head with his chest to extinguish it, igniting his desire for her; they end up married, after he divorces his wife Farida Amthoula Dulut. Camellia rebels against her mother and mocks her marriage, moving from the image of the naive girl unaware of the class structure her mother revolves in, and is forced to have an abortion. She asks Munir to speak to her while she is in the hospital bed, where he recounts their stolen kisses on his ex-wife’s balcony. Thus, the text, crafted with disregard for others, celebrates poetic moments that brush against growing desolation before the reader. The novel is not merely a game of assumptions, as the writer presents it, but a sensitive play aiming to tame cruelty or condemn it by depicting its outcomes—especially in Camellia’s transformation from an impulsive woman to another who would experience the apocalypse as “just a bad day to go out.”
The novel is highly cinematic, condensing years through scenes that feel like they come from a silent film, where words matter only insofar as their interpretations will in the future. Olga lives with a pianist, whom his mother’s abandonment drove to approach a married woman to tell him about her son, before the husband discovers the relationship. Years later, in Sandor’s mind, “Olga’s wide eyes, pleasure and delight, became eyes widened in terror.” Sandor suffers finger fractures and loses his ability to play after the husband attacks him while he is with his wife, contemplating a truncated future that his father led him to believe is suspended on his fingers.
Ez-Eldin interweaves between disciplined chapters the story of a commander, narrating it in a dramatic and traditional manner, with his fate swinging between glory and decline. He collapses in his role as a “savior,” a role tyrants often occupy, and realizes he has become a toy in unknown hands, with nothing left of his history except the tremor of the makeup he prepares for delivering speeches. Meanwhile, his guards ignore him as if he were “air.”
Notably, the novel highlights the language of the grandmother, Amidia, and its close connection to memory, pain, and departure. She learns English in the convent to erase her memory of the massacre. In exile, as an old woman awaiting her death, she looks into Rose’s eyes, who knows the meaning of pain, and enters a long monologue in Assyrian, as if through language she escapes her homeland and, through language, returns to it.
