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End Of An Cultural Era Cairo Hashish
Reviewed by Youssef Rakha
Saleh Heisa, Khairi Shalabi, Cairo: Al-Hilal Novel Series, July 2000. pp271
All You Need To Know A To Z About
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Déjeuner sur l’herbe Egyptian fashion (Photo from Egypt’s Side-shows, Nicolaas Biegman, London: Thames and Hudson, 1992) | Khairi Shalabi |
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In a melodramatic twist, Saleh glimpses the face of his father, the soldier who is holding the whip and lashing out at the Ustaz. "No one denies that haggana soldiers are kind-hearted," Shalabi points out, "except when they use their whips on government orders." Though he had experienced his father’s neglect and had witnessed the man’s mistreatment of Khala Montaha, Saleh had known nothing of his father’s brutal work. But now a struggle breaks out between father and son, revealing Saleh’s resourcefulness and setting him on course for a life beyond the family’s confines. Amm Abdel-Barr is imprisoned for six years, the family breaks up and Saleh wanders aimlessly until ending up supplying hashish.
Saleh, however, is no mere supplier. Rather, he is a permanent fixture of the characters’ day-to-day lives. His job at the supplier Hakim’s ghorza, housed in the former house of Saleh’s family that now serves as the setting of Shalabi’s novel, is to clean out and refill a daily load of 3,000 hashish bowls. A kind of modest expert at the task, a man of immense aptitude and rare pride, he displays a peculiar heisa (clamour, or commotion), often induced by drinking half a litre of meths mixed with Pepsi. This allows him to put in their place those whom he suspects of arrogance.
"During such periods of heisa, which never go on for more than two hours, Saleh Heisa would assert himself and impose respect," Shalabi writes. The next day, he continues, Saleh was as charming and as obliging as ever, to the point where he was embarrassed at the mere mention of the previous night’s heisa. "Listen, Sir," Saleh explains in one of the novel’s most memorable episodes, "the world is heisa. Human beings are heisa; everybody in it is either heisa, making heisa, or trying to catch up with heisa. They are all beggars, but each is a beggar in his own way, and I am the king of the beggars because I am a beggar in every way." Qamar El-Mahrouqi, another of the hashish den’s habitués, comments that Saleh’s "logic may not connect with people. Those who listen to him may think him mad. But if you probe his words, examining them one by one and truly understanding them, you’ll find that it is our logic that is bent and his that is straight."
Saleh is at the centre of a whole community, unlike his 1990s alter ego Soliman, and events in this community flesh out the novel. The narrator, for example, a younger version of Shalabi himself, can easily spend 20 pages on cameo parts, such as the story of Tal’at El-Imbabi, a graduate student, and his marriage to a left-wing Italian girl, Matilda, following her divorce from another member of the community. There are risks to this procedure, of course, the reader having to follow consecutive stories that are often only tenuously related to each other. However, since the next paragraphs almost invariably turn out to be as fascinating as were the previous ones, whatever their bewildering changes in subject matter, Shalabi’s narrative, sometimes going backwards, sometimes forwards, never loses pace, and it is, in any case, always linked back to the central character of Saleh. Everything and everyone revolves around him, while he fulfills his duties at the ghorza presided over by the shrewd Upper Egyptian, Hakim:
"We all went to Hakim’s ghorza individually at first, some of us in flight from another depressing or risky ghorza… some from debts that can’t be paid, some in search of old places in a crumbling world, some looking for a cheaper price … or for serious hash smoking… Thanks to Hakim we became a friendly, homogeneous group… He would pick a client [and introduce you ]… and if you came on your own, he would make a point of telling you that so-and-so was here, asked after you, being eager to see you… There was never any gossip or backstabbing… We, [who had not even heard of each other before becoming regulars at the ghorza], entered each other’s houses, visited each other at work, invited each other to parties and stood by each other in times of crisis."
The story, then, unfolds in myriad directions, but by the end we find Saleh Heisa, an active witness first of the British occupation, then of the Revolution, then of the 1967 defeat and finally of President Sadat’s 1977 trip to Jerusalem, where he always is, at the ghorza, his laughter crazier than ever, his heisa more extreme, his bitter insights into politics sounding remarkably like those of Khairi Shalabi himself, or like those of other writers of Shalabi’s generation.
Yet at the end of the novel Saleh finally oversteps the mark. After borrowing 50 piastres and leaving the ghorza for a moment, he is beaten up by the police, packed into a van and driven off. He then disappears without a trace, but is finally found in the rubbish-strewn backyard where he had always slept, lying in his age-old position, dead. The book ends with a clampdown on the hashish trade, the closure of innumerable ghoraz and the effective end of this culture to which one should be grateful, if only for its having inspired the present novel.
Like Soliman some years later, Saleh had fallen.
From http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2000/499/books1.htm