Skip to main content
Read page text
page 16
A TRAVELLING TALE names – today, the number of poets in France alone is twenty thousand – are mostly professional writers, textual technicians, instigators of metaphysical crises . . . poets who have replaced the world with words and who have exchanged existence and its tragic essence for empty rhetoric. They work with superfluous mystery, an obscure surrealism. Heidegger’s prediction has come true: the world has begun to retreat into a technical dark age, a technological trend which began pervading all aspects of human cultural knowledge years ago, even the arts, and which is replacing culture. * * * The Basha continued to urge me to read, and I read him stanzas from the poem “Narcisse”, from the book Charmes (1922). He is the only writer that I have taken with me on this long journey . . . He was sitting in the September sun, on the balcony of the apartment on the fourth floor of his building on the corniche, talking as if giving a loud monologue . . . He conversed with me as if he were accounting his memories to himself, bitterly, reliving his past as a student in Montpellier prior to the second world war, practising his French, then returning to the present with an endless elegy about what Egypt had inherited from the legacy of authoritarianism . . . I stopped reading to listen to him, comparing Egypt to Tunisia, which shares a similar, ugly authoritarian, dictatorial rule. If Western dictatorships were totalitarian and secular under Stalin and Hitler, who ushered in modern totalitarianism, then our dictatorships have derived from and benefited from the religious tribal heritage that leaves no room for the individual. For this reason, secular Bourguiba ordered paens and praise to be offered up in his name to the prophet, a form that in the Arab East is known as mawalid. Then, the Basha would snap back, telling me again to read, to go on, so I would; then I would see him as I paused between chapters, or to catch my breath, I would see him standing to one side staring into the distance, at the sea,as though he were going over the details of his past or contemplating the utopian dreams of the 1930s intellectuals, contemplating the dream as it collapsed forever with the rise of the military that had overtaken everything. From time to time I would hear his jumbled sentences, telling an anecdote from his political life before the July 23rd military uprising against the Khedive’s 14 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES
page 17
KHALED NAJAR family, the uprising that had made contemporary Egypt. * * * He said, reminiscing about his youth in France: “I studied law at the University of Montpellier.” I followed with: “That’s where Taha Hussein also studied, for a short period of time, as far as I know . . .” In those days, change depended on the educated elite, or what in leftist ideology is called the vanguard, or the intelligentsia, that elite which has now just given up, replaced by an elite of populist religious discourse, who traffics in the religious illusions that have now taken over the entire religious fields, an elite that reproduces the populist imaginary and markets it back to the people, claiming that it is charisma: And so I returned to the scientific delegations to Europe, to Rifaa Rafi’ al-Tahtawi, to Slaheddine Bouchoucha, who had been sent by the Bey’s government to London before Paris became the Mecca of the Tunisian intelligentsia, with the first Tunisian delegation before the French mandate. Bouchoucha returned from Europe and established the newspaper Al-Hadira in Tunisia at the start of the twentieth century. There is a photograph of Slaheddine Bouchoucha wearing a monocle, his moustache trimmed and his features stern, resembling Jurji Zeidan. I returned to Suleiman al-Harayri, with Ali Bash Hamba by his side, and Sheikh Mohammad al-Sinoussi, who was the tutor of Prince al-Nasser Bey and who had met Sheikh Mohammad Abduh when the latter visited Tunisia, imbibing nationalism and reformism. When he ascended to the throne in the 1920s, he allowed the Tunisian Constitutional Free Party to operate and he infused this spirit into his son, King al-Mufdi Mouncef Bey, who rejected colonialism and was sent into exile by the French, to Algeria, and then to Po, only returning to Tunisia lying in state. And to Ahmad Shawqi who studied law in France, as al-Tahtawi had done . . . Ahmad Shawqi was a contemporary of Paul Verlaine and Rimbaud but he was uninterested in them; he didn’t read any of his contemporaries, not even Stéphane Mallarmé or Paul Valéry. He read Victor Hugo, of whose poetry Hafiz Ibrahim said that it almost rivalled that of the Arabs . . .And as Jibran did after them, BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 15

Page Text

View plaintext

A TRAVELLING TALE

names – today, the number of poets in France alone is twenty thousand – are mostly professional writers, textual technicians, instigators of metaphysical crises . . . poets who have replaced the world with words and who have exchanged existence and its tragic essence for empty rhetoric. They work with superfluous mystery, an obscure surrealism. Heidegger’s prediction has come true: the world has begun to retreat into a technical dark age, a technological trend which began pervading all aspects of human cultural knowledge years ago, even the arts, and which is replacing culture.

* * *

The Basha continued to urge me to read, and I read him stanzas from the poem “Narcisse”, from the book Charmes (1922).

He is the only writer that I have taken with me on this long journey . . . He was sitting in the September sun, on the balcony of the apartment on the fourth floor of his building on the corniche, talking as if giving a loud monologue . . . He conversed with me as if he were accounting his memories to himself, bitterly, reliving his past as a student in Montpellier prior to the second world war, practising his French, then returning to the present with an endless elegy about what Egypt had inherited from the legacy of authoritarianism . . . I stopped reading to listen to him, comparing Egypt to Tunisia, which shares a similar, ugly authoritarian, dictatorial rule. If Western dictatorships were totalitarian and secular under Stalin and Hitler, who ushered in modern totalitarianism, then our dictatorships have derived from and benefited from the religious tribal heritage that leaves no room for the individual. For this reason, secular Bourguiba ordered paens and praise to be offered up in his name to the prophet, a form that in the Arab East is known as mawalid.

Then, the Basha would snap back, telling me again to read, to go on, so I would; then I would see him as I paused between chapters, or to catch my breath, I would see him standing to one side staring into the distance, at the sea,as though he were going over the details of his past or contemplating the utopian dreams of the 1930s intellectuals, contemplating the dream as it collapsed forever with the rise of the military that had overtaken everything. From time to time I would hear his jumbled sentences, telling an anecdote from his political life before the July 23rd military uprising against the Khedive’s

14 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content