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

ideas. He was different from anybody else I had known. Even his name was unique, his father and grandfather for some reason favoring Mahmoud over any other name, which made his name Mahmoud Mahmoud Mahmoud. This had excited the mockery of his colleagues at school, where they named him Mahmoud Times Three, or Triple Mahmoud, and this name had stuck with him until even he came to use it. When I met him, Mahmoud was a little over forty and his life could be summed up as a series of determined but unsuccessful attempts to succeed in a variety of fields. At university he had studied—one after the other—engineering, fine arts, and cinema, only to abandon them all. When I asked him the reason, he replied, “I realized that the educational system in Egypt leads to the stifling of creativity in the student, and, in addition, to his being tortured psychologically.” When I looked dubious, he added by way of clarification that “the great artists and pioneers of cinema in Egypt created the cinema first, and only established the Institute of Cinema later, proving that they didn’t need the institute’s classes in order to create the cinema.”

This strange and eccentric logic, which was not without its validity, was an example of Mahmoud’s take on life, and most of his actions and thoughts were characterized by the same equal mix of eccentricity and original thinking. He was incapable of getting along with stupidity, bureaucracy, and social hypocrisy and was straightforward, frank, and sensitive to the highest degree to any slighting of his opinions or personal dignity—all characteristics designed to bring failure in their wake in the corrupt situation in which we live in Egypt. All the same, despite his rejection of the educational system, he was far from lazy. Once persuaded by an idea, he would exert honest and exceptional efforts to see it put into practice. He was also one of the most diligent readers I have met in my life, having educated himself so well that he had attained an encyclopedic knowledge of art, history, and literature. He was a gifted painter but his first exhibition, in Egypt, failed to attract the interest he had expected, so he decided to take his paintings to France and exhibit them there, telling his friends, “I shall take my art to those who understand art.” Someone asked him, “How can you go to France when you don’t know a word of French?” Staring at him with contempt, as though calling down curses on his stupidity, he said, “Am I going to France to talk?”

Needless to say, he failed in France, where, as he sat on a sidewalk on the banks of the Seine, he described his situation with a mixture of sarcasm and bitterness as that of “a hungry bankrupt, on whom and on whose paintings the heavy rain descends.”

I stayed friends with Mahmoud for a good while, and he had an impact on me. I was fond of him and felt very sad at the way in which his fate had become so circumscribed. A few years later, Mahmoud suffered a nervous breakdown; he was treated in clinics more than once. Then he fell into the slough of narcotics and this led to his early and sudden death at an age of less than fifty. My sorrow over Mahmoud was both personal and general. On the one hand, I sympathized with the trials of one blessed with authentic talent who harbors great hopes only to see them all dashed. On the other, I felt that in all fields Egypt was losing major talents and forces, such as Mahmoud, through tyranny and corruption. Had Mahmoud been born in a democracy, whose citizens had access to justice and nuturing, he would have had a different fate in both art and life. I thought about the tragedy of Mahmoud so much that one day I woke up and asked myself, “Why not write about him? How he would feel and how he would think, and how he would throw out those profound, mocking, intelligent comments that rest on the knife edge between wisdom and madness?” I assumed the character of Mahmoud as though I were an actor, and this was not particularly difficult to do as he had occupied my thoughts so much. The moment I placed a ream of paper in front of me and opened my pen, I set to and I wrote a number of pages at one sitting. I continued working enthusiastically, day after day, until the book was finished. Its protagonist, Isam Abd el-Ati—a frustrated, highly educated young man who suffers from the tyranny, corruption, and hypocrisy in Egyptian society and compares these with the false discourse of self-congratulation repeated by the government media about the greatness of the Egyptians and their millennia-old civilization—bears a close resemblance to Triple Mahmoud.

The novella, which is written in the first person, starts with the hero bitterly mocking the famous words of nationalist leader Mustafa Kamil, “If I weren’t Egyptian, I would want to be Egyptian,” after which follows a torrent of biting criticism directed at Egyptians. In truth, it never occurred to me while I was writing the book that it would cause me problems. I showed it to friends and all were enthusiastic in their praise and this encouraged me to take the manuscript to the General Egyptian Book Organization (GEBO) with the idea of submitting it for publication and completely confident that it would win their attention, and perhaps even a warm welcome. But there, in the Organization’s sumptuous building on the Corniche, Egypt’s corrupt cultural establishment dealt me my first shock. It turned out that it was the custom at the GEBO to divide authors into three categories. The first consisted of well-known authors, and these had their works published straightaway. The second consisted of authors who came with a recommendation from someone important in the state, and their works were published too, depending on the degree of influence