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KHALED NAJAR pointed me to the corner where he usually sat, and I glimpsedTawfiq al-Hakim and Naguib Mahfouz amidst a group of elderly, well-off men. I recognized them immediately . . . I knew them from their pictures in magazines. They sat on chairs made from woven palm fronds and were surrounded by people I didn’t recognize. I advanced slowly, clumsily to where they sat in the middle of the room and I can’t remember what I asked the seated men after greeting them. Tawfiq al-Hakim motioned to me to sit down, as if he had noticed my awkwardness; I sat down with difficulty on the arm of a chair, almost apologizing for my sheer presence in the world. As soon as I was seated, I mentioned that I had come from Tunisia, that I was heading to Damascus, and that Salah Abdel Sabur had asked me to drop by and see him here. One of them said that Salah had returned to Cairo the week before. I don’t know how, but Tawfiq al-Hakim asked me what I wrote, and I answered that I wrote poetry. The loud man turned towards me, the film director who sat to my left, and asked, half-curiously, half-jokingly: “You commit poetry?” Embarrassed, dragging the words out of my body, I replied that I did, but he had turned back to Naguib Mahfouz and his earlier conversation, yelling: “That, my dear Ustaz Naguib is the response of the realist school, the response of the realist school.” I stayed in my seat, and all I can remember after that is that Tawfiq al-Hakim said to me: “Here it is still possible to speak out, but in Damascus, you’re going to have to be careful.” I don’t know why he said that and I don’t know what the context of his words was; perhaps they had been discussing this before I interrupted their conversation, or perhaps it was the fact that the subject of freedom of expression was always present in the consciousness of intellectuals during the days of Abdel Nasser. The status of such intellectuals had become more difficult since the liberal age of their youth under the monarchy, when the climate of exposure to theWest was a harbinger of renaissance and the outlook inaugurated by alTahtawi and the ideological perspective of Khedive Ismail produced the ideology of a maritime Egypt, open to the Mediterranean. Now, there is a landlocked self-sufficiency and a return to “village values”, words that mean nothing. * * * BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 19

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