Mahfouz's Sheikh Abd-Rabbih al-Ta'ih and Persian Mystic Hafiz

                As has been labeled characteristic of Middle Eastern writing, Naguib Mahfouz, in his autobiographical writings entitled Echoes of an Autobiography, writes in short and pithy riddles, proverbs, and stories. Though Mahfouz writes here in prose, the style and overall effect of the writing reminded me of fourteenth-century Persian mystic and poet Hafiz.

                Especially in the second half of Mahfouz’s book, he gives the sayings and aphorisms of Sheikh Abd-Rabbih al-Ta’ih (106). It is especially evident here the inextricable melding of spirituality, happiness, sorrow, daily life, and death. For Sheikh Abd-Rabbih al-Ta’ih, for Hafiz, and perhaps for Mahfouz as well, god and love inhabit the spaces, the emptinesses between joy and sadness, purpose and idleness, life and death, this world and the next. Mahfouz cites Sheikh Abd-Rabbih al-Ta’ih: “Some people are preoccupied with life and others are preoccupied with death. As for me, my position is firmly fixed in the middle way” (109). And here he speaks of the compensations of love: “The breeze of love blows for an hour and makes amends for the ill winds of the whole of a lifetime” (111). The mystic Hafiz attests to this powerfully merciful and redeeming love in his “The Sun Never Says”:

Even

After

All this time

The sun never says to the earth,

“You owe

Me.”

Look

What happens

With a love like that,

It lights the

Whole

Sky.

These writers’ theologies leave room for loving this world, “for it hardly has a hand in what occurs in it,” and its people and the beautiful things within it (108). Even when there is “forgetfulness” and even “nonexistence,” there may be enjoyment in music, in “listening to tawashih” (9). It is divine love and love that may fill humans as well that redeems and gives beauty to this life for Mahfouz’s Sheikh Abd-Rabbih al-Ta’ih and Hafiz. 

Gender Roles in Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness

             In his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz revisits an underlying issue including in his novel My Michael: gender roles and their emotional and mental consequences. The issue is most explicitly addressed by Amos’ Aunt Sonia, his mother’s younger sister. She claims that girls of her time were “brainwashed” into accepting their roles as women (180). And these roles were strongest for mothers: Sonia was “always taught that women are entitled to an education and a place outside the home--but only until the children are born” (178). While all kinds of “notions of freedom” were being discussed while Sonia, Fania, and Haya were adolescents, Sonia argues that no freedom was brought “between him and her” (181). Instead, women continued to live in a silent torture, “walking in the dark in a cellar full of scorpions with no shoes on” (180).

                The theme of gender roles takes on great significance in A Tale of Love and Darkness as it is offered as a contributing factor to Amos’ mother’s suicide. Though readers may not hear directly from Fania, her own frustration with stereotypical gender roles is evidenced in a story recounted by Sonia. She remembers a painting hanging in her family’s dining room of a young girl whose underskirts were showing; it “seemed modest but it wasn’t really” (185). One day, Fania exploded about the painting, saying that the image naively “ignore[d] suffering” (186). The painting misrepresented and minimized the hard work and plight of the young peasant woman. Sonia draws a more direct correlation between Fania’s suicide and the overbearing oppression of gender roles when she tearfully laments: “Every time I remember that prettified picture, every time I see a picture with three underskirts and a feathery sky, I see scorpions ravaging my sister and I start to cry” (186). The image Sonia uses to embody women’s suffering in general is applied to her deceased sister.

While there have been “freedoms” brought to the issues “between him and her,” stereotypes about gender and gender roles continue to serve as stifling forces (181). Even in the relatively egalitarian and secularized setting of the United States in the twenty-first century, one can feel the societal and cultural pressures to behave in certain ways and make certain decisions based on gender. The lamentations of Aunt Sonia in A Tale of Love and Darkness both voice the loss felt by oppressed women and remind me of the opportune advances that have been made from which I benefit today.

Writing About Oneself and the Difficulty of Telling Nothing But the Truth

                The failure of memory is common to all people, but it presents a special difficulty to the memoirists--to those whose purpose is to catalogue the happenings of their lives and the lives of those around them. It is this particular task Orhan Pamuk intends to complete in his own memoir Istanbul and that Pamuk’s character Hoja intends to complete in the novel The White Castle. While others’ stories and influences shape the writers’ memories, the task of the memoirist persists. Perhaps this serves to prove that the primary intention of the memoirist and the writer is not to communicate facts but to capture life as it is experienced in an attempt to connect to readers.

                In the first chapter of his memoir, Pamuk admits the challenge of distinguishing between what has been constructed as “memories” in our own minds and what has actually happened. Pamuk writes of the possibility of reconstructed memories resembling the hagiographies of the saints: “[O]ur cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, all as reported by our parents, [become] stories to which we listen with the same rapt attention we might pay some brilliant tale of some other person” (8). But he does not attempt to combat this phenomenon. In fact, Pamuk confesses to framing his own story in this way: “I’d have liked to write my entire story this way--as if my life were something that happened to someone else, as if it were a dream in which I felt my voice fading and my will succumbing to enchantment” (8). Perhaps, Pamuk asserts, the “memories” offered by others become more influential than our own memories: “Once imprinted in our minds, other people’s report of what we’ve done end up mattering more than what we ourselves remember” (8). Even more, it is not just the stories told by our parents and families that inform the “reinvention” of our childhoods: “In later years, when I was reinventing the Istanbul of my childhood with the black-and-white pictures in my mind, elements of these writers’ Istanbul blended together, and it became impossible to think about the city, even my own city, without thinking of them all” (108). Given the nature of our memories and their vulnerability to various influences, the task of relaying an objective account of one’s life nears impossible.

                Ultimately, these supplementary influences on “memories” lead to Pamuk’s explicit warning and confession: “So anyone reading these pages should bear in mind that I am prone to exaggeration” (295). At the same time, however, Pamuk argues that the actual factuality of the elements of the writing is not the absolute intention. Instead, a memoir’s “symmetry” may be prioritized above its “factual accuracy,” just as “shape” is more important than “reality” in painting and the “ordering” of events supersedes “the course of events” in novels (295). Pamuk’s goal in his writing is not to inform his readers of the exact happenings of his life, but rather to “put these images into written words, find the language to express this dark spirit, this tired and mysterious confusion” (360). He realizes that “there is a difference between facts and stories” while at the same time seeing a necessity for a “hierarchical logic that gives some things more importance than others” (166). Recognizing the differences between “fact” and “story” may be an important practice for the reader, but making the exact distinctions among the details of the text may in fact detract from the experience of the text.

                Interestingly, this struggle between capturing one’s life accurately and the tricks played on the mind and memory continues in Pamuk’s intentionally fictional work. Pamuk’s created characters Hoja and his slave in the novel The White Castle embark on a mission to write a treatise entitled “Why I Am What I Am” (64). The writer was to “work out who [he] was and write it down” (60). However, Hoja’s anxiety about what others will think of his work paralyzes his honesty. Though he sets out to write the truths about himself, he ends up writing “nothing but reasons why ‘they’ [i.e., the Westerners] were so inferior and stupid” (64). At the same time, Hoja finds himself unable “to write without first hearing [his slave’s] opinion of his ideas” (54). Hoja’s obsession with the judgment of his readers keeps him from being unashamedly honest in his writing.

The treatise “Why I Am What I Am” was also to include the details of the author’s life so far. Hoja is prone to the same exaggeration to which Pamuk admits in his memoir Istanbul, as Hoja’s slave points out: “I learned that he also had been the most intelligent, cleverest, most diligent, and the strongest of his brothers; he had also been the most honest” (63). But Hoja’s slave, too, affirms that some manipulation may be necessary to create a captivating story: “I remembered I’d once planned to write my memoirs when I returned to my country: when I said I might one day make a good story of his adventures, he looked at me in disgust” (85). The theme of somehow enhancing the characters of a story to make the reading more enjoyable continues as The White Castle’s narrator claims, “For the sake of my readers in that terrible world to come, I did all I could to make both myself and Him, who I could not separate from myself, come alive in the story” (155). Again, the speaker of the novel argues that this manipulation of the characters and events does the readers a favor, saying that his task is to “dream up something my reader would find believable and try to make the details enjoyable” (61). Some amount of invention seems inextricable from the act of writing about the past.

                Between his memoir Istanbul and his novel The White Castle, Orhan Pamuk offers a strong argument that writing about oneself is a process plagued by a relativity of truth. Still, this process is worth the struggle; the speaker of The White Castle “believe[s] in [his] story” (157). Though Istanbul and the works produced by the characters in The White Castle may not achieve factual accuracy, they do succeed in the task of creating stories with which readers can connect and glean from. According to Pamuk, the latter is priority. 

Some Thoughts on and Questions about Omeros

               Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros is massive in its scope, dealing specifically with the island of St. Lucia and its history and people, more generally with the themes of colonialism and history (and History), and traversing the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and Africa. While not quite as central, Walcott also layers his lines with themes including: language, love, naming, religion, race, home, writing, and the tradition of the arts--both written and visual. Perhaps the greatest difficulty reading Walcott’s Omeros lies in this density of language and historical and artistic allusions. Still, one may trace firstly the story of Achille, Hector, and Helen and the story of the Plunketts on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. Just as prevalent, however, is the story Walcott interjects about himself and his family.

                I have a feeling that every time one reads Omeros, more is discovered. I was never left disappointed in finding new layers and allusions in the texts. And I’m sure many were missed.

                One issue that complicated my comprehension of the text was the surprise of Walcott’s own autobiographical insertions. It took me a while to realize when and if Walcott himself was speaking. In addition, while literary, artistic, or historic allusions may be clarified via Wikipedia, many of Walcott’s autobiographical details cannot be easily found out. With the ambiguity about who is speaking, the challenge to decipher what is autobiographical becomes a significant difficulty. But perhaps it does not matter exactly what is autobiographically proven--what is in fact in Walcott’s own history. With or without an understanding that some of the information in the story is autobiographical, Walcott powerfully tells the story of oppression and systemic injustice in St. Lucia and other colonies around the world.

                Another difficulty in reading Omeros is the prevalence of recurring images that may or may not serve as symbols. For example, while swords, anchors, and swifts all prompt the shape of the cross, this may not consistently be a desired overtone. Other recurring images--birds and leaves--conjure up many different associations. And perhaps all of them are intended in some dosage.

                Part of the challenge of reading Omeros lies in the fact that allusions and symbols are missed and misunderstood. Still, what is caught, what is grasped, is worth the tedious task of close reading.

Melancholy, Salinger's Holden, and Pamuk's Pamuk

            Though of different continents, Orhan Pamuk in his memoir Istanbul resembled, at some points, Holden of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Most obviously, the two stories connect in their intention of cataloguing the coming-of-age of a young man--even more, a relatively rich, urban-dwelling young man. Though The Catcher in the Rye documents only a few days of Holden’s adolescent life and Istanbul tells of the first twenty-some years of Pamuk’s life, the two characters overlap in their disgust with “dishonesty” and “insincerity,” with the superficiality of their relationships (Pamuk 307). Pamuk admits his own part in the ruse: “With each of these friends I was different person, with a different sense of humor, a different voice, a different moral code” (311). For Holden, dissatisfaction with human relationships directly leads to his melancholy. And this sadness serves as the strongest similarity between the two books.

The sentiments the two men feel are not exactly the same: while Holden’s melancholy is strongly individual, Pamuk writes of his “confused, hazy state of melancholy . . . hüzün, which denotes a melancholy that is communal rather than private” (89). However, this “cultural concept conveying worldly failure, listlessness, and spiritual suffering” felt by the people of Istanbul is transposed into the United States as disillusioned teenager Holden wanders the streets of New York City (91). Still, both Holden and Pamuk find a sort of contentment even in their states of sadness. Pamuk admits, “I love the overwhelming melancholy when I look at the walls of old apartment buildings and the dark surfaces of neglected, unpainted, fallen-down wooden mansions” (35). Even more, hüzün is said to “bring us comfort, softening the view like the condensation on a window when a teakettle has been spouting steam on a winter’s day” (89). Similarly, it is therapeutic for Holden to roll around in his own melancholy for a while. He is finally able to feel peace as he sits in the pouring rain, watching his little sister ride a carousel: “I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all” (Salinger 275). After all, the hüzün is “ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating” (Pamuk 91). 

The Universality of Human Experience

               Orhan Pamuk’s novel The White Castle sets up a direct confrontation of east and west in the form of Hoja, a Turkish scholar, and his newly acquired slave from Venice. But just as the two men are set up for a juxtaposition--an examination of eastern culture and learning versus western culture and learning--their differences are erased. The sovereign could have predicted this; he asks: “[M]ust one be a sultan to understand that men, in the four corners and seven climes of the world, all resembled one another?” (151). But Hoja discovers this truth over time and after much testing. On the military campaign in the Christian territories of Poland, he embarks on an inquisition of Christian villagers, asking for their “greatest transgression” (132). He would like to find the difference between “us” and “them” (119). Instead, he finds that Muslims “[make] more or less the same confessions and [tell] the same stories as their Christian neighbors” (135). He wondered if anything would change if Istanbul was taken over by his slave’s western empire: “[D]id defeat mean that people would change and alter their beliefs without noticing it?” (109). And Hoja’s slave doubts that it “would make [any] difference whether I became a Muslim or not” (41). Even the elevated matter of religion cannot serve to distinguish and separate people. The characteristics that define an eastern person from a western person--dress, education, language, religion--are dismissed as subject to chance. These coincidental attributes shrink in comparison to uniting forces of shared human experience.

                I have found that this is mostly true--at least at the elemental level. I have had the privilege of sharing feelings of sadness, apprehension, and joy with people from countries far from this one. Even while I may be differentiated from a Maasai woman of Tanzania by continent, economic system, class, race, and religion, we hold hands and laugh at the dancing men. 

Power in the Spoken Truth

The abstraction called “truth” is identified as a priority for humans. However, though truth has “not deprived anyone of the hope of attaining it,” it has at the same time “not made for anyone a path to it” (Mahfouz 228). And rightly so: truth holds immense power. In several works of contemporary world literature, the idea of truth has the power to drive apart or reassemble families, legitimize people and their voices, and even overcome supernatural trickery.

                While an acceptance and understanding of truth and reality holds the potential for human rising above adversity, a rejection of the same truths can be equally influential, though destructive. In Amos Oz’s novel My Michael, young wife and mother Hannah does not accept in full the reality of her life. As the narrator, she helps the reader understand why, quoting her late father: “[P]ure truth . . . is thoroughly destructive and leads nowhere. What can ordinary people do? All we can do is silently stand and stare” (Oz 37). Instead of embracing this “pure truth,” Hannah clings to an unrealistic vision of her future, hoping to “marry a young scholar who was destined to become world-famous” (Oz 37, 48). But her visions are not limited to scenes of idealized happiness; Hannah’s escape into unreality includes the terrific and the dark. As “Yvonne Azulai,” her dream alias, Hannah is the “Princess” (Oz 174). She rules the city of Danzig as it is seized by “the heavy breathing of a brooding evil” (Oz 175). She, the Princess, also succumbs to this evil as “the assassins’ hands” grab her (Oz 177). In these dark daydreams, she can feel--unlike during the numbing “sameness” of her days at home (Oz 89). She explains the draw of this type of masochism: “I had a body and it was mine and it throbbed and thrilled and was alive” (Oz 173). Still, though her techniques of escape reconnect Hannah with her body and life, her preference for the world of her dreams may serve as the primary obstacle in Hannah and Michael’s marriage. Michael “can’t understand what’s got into” her, and the two suffer through this disconnect (Oz 164).

                On the other hand, the uncovering of truth has empowering and constructive capabilities. In Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros, the forgotten past of the island of St. Lucia is brought to the forefront and the voice of a diverse people is reconstructed. Walcott’s documentation serves to rewrite history; the colonial British rulers of the island no longer serve as the only historians. While “Major” Sergeant Plunkett and the British remember the “Battle of the Saints” in which St. Lucia was acquired as a colony, they may not remember the island’s first name, “Iounalao,” or the island’s first inhabitants, the “Aruacs” (Walcott 28, 4, 5). And the story of the St. Lucians with African ancestry is different from that of the British, too: “Herdsmen haieing cattle / who set out to found no cities; they were found, / who were bound for no victories; they were the bound, / who leveled nothing before them; they were the ground” (Walcott 22). “History saw [the African villages]” of St. Lucia merely as “shacks [that] would creep down the ridges to become towns” (Walcott 57). But this can change. Plunkett admits, “Helen needed a history, / . . . / Not his, but her story. Not theirs, but Helen’s war” (Walcott 30). It is prophesied: “History will be revised” (Walcott 92). The call for a retelling of the island’s history is answered by Derek Walcott. As a sort of mission statement, Walcott writes:

                               

Look, they climb, and no one knows them;

they take their copper pittances, and your duty

from the time you watched them from your grandmother’s house

as a child wounded by their power and beauty

is the chance you now have, to give those feet a voice. (75-6)

Walcott, by offering a more complete picture of the truth, redeems the voice and heritage of entire people groups of St. Lucia. The truth communicated validates the stories and existence of the people themselves. The centuries-long silence is broken.

                Human apprehension and speaking of truth similarly holds the power to alter history in Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Arabian Nights and Days, even when the supernatural in the form of a genie interferes. At first, Sanaan al-Gamali’s interaction with the genie Qumqam leaves him lost; his “confused mind . . . chewed over memories as though they were delusions” (Mahfouz 21). But Gamasa al-Bulti, charged to kill the governor by the genie Singam, claims to see the truth clearer than before. As Gamasa draws his sword for the murder, he claims that “the truth is being spoken for the first time” (Mahfouz 46). Ma’rouf the cobbler, though he lies about his possession of Solomon’s ring, is truly a fair and pleasing ruler to the people of his quarter. The truth--that he does not own the ring--does not lead to his execution but rather to his promotion to governor (Mahfouz 206). The genie Zarmabaha disguises herself as the beautiful Anees al-Galees to trick powerful men into humiliation (Mahfouz 137). But the wisdom of the “madman,” who was formerly called Gamasa, sheds light on the genie’s trickery, saying, “I see nothing but walls between which the breaths of the ancient plague rebound” (Mahfouz 143). This truth dissolves the plot: “With extraordinary speed there was nothing left of her but disparate parts, which themselves were transformed into smoke that simply disappeared and left no trace” (Mahfouz 143). The verbalization of what is honest trumps the deceptive plots of the genies and instills in humans an almost supernatural power.

                For those in the modern West, perhaps a more understandable portrayal of truth’s power may be found in the universal context of the family in Please Look After Mom, a story set in South Korea. Before the disappearance of the family’s mother, the children and father do not know the truth about her. Chi-hon, the mother Park So-nyo’s eldest daughter, suggests that “either a mother and daughter know each other very well, or they are strangers” (Shin 18). Chi-hon and her mother belong to the latter group. Chi-hon and her mother had superficial conversations: “Your words had to with whether she ate, whether she was healthy, how Father was, that she should be careful not to catch cold, that you were sending money” (Shin 35). While Chi-hon had “never thought of Mom as separate from the kitchen,” Park So-nyo herself sometimes felt as if the kitchen was a “prison” (Shin 55, 61). After learning that her mother had long-lasting and paralyzing headaches, Chi-hon admits to herself: “You could no longer say you knew Mom” (Shin 25). In fact, Chi-hon, like her siblings, realizes the misconceptions she has passively accepted her whole life: “To you, Mom was always Mom. It never occurred to you that she had once taken her first step, or had once been three or twelve or twenty years old. Mom was Mom. She was born as Mom” (Shin 27). But Park So-nyo’s physical disappearance prompts her family to discover the truth about her life--her condition, birth year, relationships, pastimes, and feelings. Uncovering this truth proves to hold restorative power for the family’s relationship: “Only after Mom went missing did you realize that her stories were piled inside you, in endless stacks. . . . Her everyday words, which you didn’t think deeply about and sometimes dismissed as useless when she was with you, awoke in your heart, creating tidal waves” (Shin 246). Hearing the truth about Park So-nyo, rather than accepting the silence surrounding her personal life and thought, energizes her family to overcome isolation and recognize that they have “needed her [their] entire [lives]” (Shin 228).

                Though the quest for truth is not a new idea in literature, the modern era presents endless challenges to ideas of reality. In the characters’ searches, truth is obfuscated by ideas absorbed in earlier years, histories written by the powerful, interferences of the supernatural, and silence. However, when this silence is broken, when the truth about family and history is discovered and spoken, characters find the strength to overcome--to be legitimized in their voices, to live with dignity, and to restore relationships.