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University of Venice, Italy
Zaat, a concise and amusing novel by the Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim (Dar al Mustaqbal al ‘arabi, first edition 1992), leads the reader by the hand through the vicissitudes of a woman named Dhat. The story is narrated on one hand by the telling of Dhat’s personal story, and on the other hand by a more collective and choral History. The super-omniscient narrator cheekily begins the novel breaking into "the moment she slid into our world bespattered with blood, and the shock, the first of many she would endure, that followed as she was lifted feet first into the air and given a hefty slap on her backside." Right from the beginning, the god-like narrator introduces this first traumatic experience which corresponds to the "entrance" into the novel soon after followed by a second traumatic experience, decisive for the whole story, that is her wedding night or Layla al- dukhula, in Arabic the "entrance" night. From this first conceit, which is perfectly comprehensible also in Calderbank’s most accurate translation, it is possibile to catch Ibrahim’s usual and ruthless sarcasm, sagaciously expressed as well through the presence of Zaat, ideal victim. The odd and unusual name of the main character is above all a feminine personal pronoun which can be transliterated as "dhāt", and approximately translated as "self" or alternatively as "identity" or "essence" depending on the context. In this case, the name becomes extremely evocative as well as being a word defining a precise literary process. The reader gradually familiarizes with the plot and Zaat’s inner and outer world, so that Zaat will soon become the natural refrain as the narration unfolds. Like many young women from Cairo in the Mid Sixties, Zaat has a dream, that is belonging to the lower middle-class. This can only come true by marrying Abdel Maguid young man with a hopeful future in front of him despite many years spent at University with poor results so that she will have a house in the quiet and clean suburb of Heliopolis, far from the chaotic and filthy town centre, and consequently a job position as journalist or telecommunications operator, a foolish aspiration immediately given up. But soon after, as emphasized by the irony of the story, the idyllic dream of wealth during the socialist Nasser era is replaced by the economic straits of liberalization arising with the Sadat era and its new rhetoric of Infitah and the first signs of the newly-born and extended process of Islamization. Zaat will gradually accept these new signs, fitting her garments to the changing scenario and abandoning clothes like miniskirts that she had worn in her youthness. From the failure of the entrepreneurial ambitions to the failure of the most common events of daily-life–when they buy a barrel of herrings–the reader gets absorbed by an ordered disorder of critical and miserable vicissitudes of the main characters, the couple Zaat and Abdel Maguid and their neighbours, the couple Samiha and Shanqeety. Zaat can only shed the tears on the toilet, away from Abdel Maguid’s eyes. From the traumatic experience of her wedding night, his sexual desire is confined to her silent cries. Along with the deterioration of material conditions, there is a collapse of the interpersonal and sexual relations between Zaat and Abdel Maguid and between Samiha and Shanqeety. This results for the men in actions of self-sufficiency, whilst the women find solace in their dreams. The author’s sense of humour never comes to a stop not even in front of the more dramatic questions including those merely linked to the woman’s condition, which Zaat experiences in the first person or meets in the middle of a plethora of events and characters, as if she were a sort of space probe. The text structure alternates fiction chapters with chapters organized as a collage made of newspaper clippings, mainly extracted from newspapers of the Eighties, government and opposition papers. All the documents used follow a specific order based on a central theme–from the corruption involving entrepreneurs and politicians, to social questions, such as speculations made by pharmaceutical companies and so on. The text is deliberately disorganized and the disunity is counterbalanced by the organized chaos of the contents. A network of references and parallelisms has been built to connect the two antithetic aspects of the novel–that is fiction and history–so that some events cannot be comprehended without the support of documentation. Owing to their great contribution to the comprehension of the plot, such historic chapters have been referred to as docu-fiction’s chapters in Samia Mehrez’s book Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction. As Samia Mehrez underlines, the final effect resulting from this writing technique is the creation of a borderline shading from the sphere of fiction to that of history, therefore intertwining symbolic representations and fragments from reality, which is typical of post-modern literatures. Moreover, it is to be noticed how some episodes within the novel such as when Zaat’s colleagues boycott her work or when Zaat worries because the three-year-old Amgad is not yet able to speak encourage the reader to go through the book experiencing a complicated network of communication channels among different characters, such as Zaat’s girl-friends, neighbours and colleagues. As Calderbank quotes in the translator’s preface, "In Zaat’s world people are valued for the quality or originality of their transmission material and life is a constant struggle to find something fresh and exciting with which to accost one’s listeners." So we should not be surprised if the "transmissions" between colleagues, neighbours and Dhat, continously dazed and troubled in this whirl of "emissions," follow the same rules imposed on broadcasting–that is censorship–which apply to the world of media. Vividly and with great precision the translated novel reflects the pace of the narration and the more intimate fears, ambitions and delusions of Zaat, which scan the articulated reality of a continously changing country. ●
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