Friendly Fire, Alaa Aswany [10 ebook reader .TXT] 📗

that what we are reading is not made up but has actually happened. (It is because of this make-believe that the lights are turned off in theaters, whether of stage or screen.) It follows that the confusion that occurs in the minds of some between imagination and reality is an indicator of the artist’s excellence in the execution of his work, since he has succeeded in making the reader’s make-believe seem true, though, in this case, the make-believe is exaggerated and causes him to cease to distinguish between form and reality.

The second reason lies in the fact that literature is an art of life. The novel is a life on paper that resembles our daily lives, but which is more profound, significant, and beautiful. It follows that literature is not an isolated art. On the contrary, its matter is life itself and it intersects with the human sciences such as history, sociology, and ethnology. This intersection is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it provides the novelist with inexhaustible ammunition for his writing while on the other, negative, side, it drives some to read works of fiction as though they were studies in sociology, which is fundamentally mistaken. The writer of fiction is not a scholar but an artist impacted emotionally by characters from life, who then strives to present these in his works. These characters present us with human truth but do not necessarily represent social truth.

A work of fiction may be of benefit in that it gives us certain indications concerning a given society but it is incapable of presenting its essence, in the scientific meaning of the term. Sociology, with its field-based and theoretical studies, its statistics and its graphs, is capable of presenting the scientific essence of a given society but this is not the role of the novel or the poem. The character of a young, Egyptian, headscarf-wearing woman in a novel may give us an idea about the feelings and problems of some women who wear headscarves but certainly does not represent all the women who wear headscarves in Egypt. Anyone who wants to know the ‘truth’ about the phenomenon of the headscarf must consult the studies on the topic conducted by sociologists.

Why am I writing this?

Because this confusion between imagination and truth, between the work of fiction and the sociological study, was applied to my novella The Isam Abd el-Ati Papers, much in the manner of a curse, and led to its being banned for many long years. How did this come about?

2

On my return from my studies in the United States at the end of the 1980s, I decided to dedicate all my efforts to becoming a writer, while at the same time I was obliged to work as a dentist to earn my living. As a result, my life came to be divided into two completely separate parts—the dignified, well-managed life of a respected dentist, and the life of a free man of letters, devoid of all social shackles and pre-existing rules. Each day, after finishing my medical work, I would throw myself into the discovery of life in its most authentic and exciting forms. I would roam strange places and get to know unusual characters, driven by an insatiable curiosity about and genuine need to understand people and learn from them. How many nights I spent in odd, raucous partying with characters who piqued my interest, following which I would be obliged to go by the house to take a shower and drink a quick cup of coffee before taking off again to start, without having slept, my work at the hospital. Day after day, I worked at forming my own group of amazing characters. I made friends with poor people and rich, retired politicians and bankrupt former princes, alcoholics, ex-convicts, fallen women, religious fanatics, con men, thugs, and gang leaders, all the time maintaining a precise and rigorous distance between the worlds of night and day. Sometimes, despite myself, problems would occur: at the end of one night when I had been drinking at a cheap bar downtown, a fierce quarrel erupted between two drunks, one of whom dragged the other out of the bar and began beating him in the street. With some other well-meaning customers, I rushed to break up the fight and bring about the required reconciliation. The whole scene was accompanied, needless to say, by a huge uproar, loud shouting, and slanderous insults. In no time we heard the sound of a window being opened in the building opposite, and a man, obviously aroused from sleep, appeared and started shouting angrily, threatening to call the police if we did not desist immediately from making such a drunken row. When I raised my head to look at him, I recognized him: it was one of my patients at the clinic. Certain he had seen me, I quietly stole away. A few days later I had an appointment to measure him for a set of false teeth. I received him normally. While I was working, he kept peering at me suspiciously. Finally, no longer able to contain himself, he said to me, “Excuse me, doctor. Do you sometimes spend the evenings in places downtown?” I was expecting the question, so I gave him an innocent smile and said in the accents of a professional liar, “I can’t go out in the evenings during the week as I have to wake up early to do my surgical procedures, as you know.”

The patient gave a sigh of relief and said, “That’s what I thought too. Not long ago, I saw someone who looked like you in the street at four in the morning, but I told myself it couldn’t possibly be you.”

Fortunately, however, such incidents didn’t occur often. One night, when on my fascinating nocturnal wanderings, I ran into Triple Mahmoud. A friend had introduced me to him and I had been captivated from the first moment by his extraordinary intelligence and the originality of his