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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
Cairo's cannabis-smoking literati relied during the 1990s on an African bango
supplier named Soliman. When Soliman was finally arrested, confusion reigned,
frustrated "owners of the high humour" (as the Arabic expression has
it) scouring the lengths and breadths of the city for a suitable alternative.
The terminology of the politically committed 1960s -- during which hashish was
both widely available and affordable -- was used to describe the predicament of
cannabis deprivation in the apolitical 1990s. It was said, in the most tragic of
tones, that "Soliman the symbol has fallen," the implication being
that with his disappearance an entire way of life had vanished, inducing a sense
of loss comparable to that felt upon the collapse of the Soviet Union. Soliman
had been one of the few remaining expressions of sixties consciousness, and now
he too was gone.
But in reality, of course, even in Soliman's time a bango gathering was
regarded as an inadequate alternative to the older practices of Egyptian hashish
culture. In contrast to the widely felt nostalgia for the goza, the Egyptian
waterpipe in which hashish burns atop a screen of me'assel tobacco, and for the
ghorza, the now nearly extinct clandestine cafe-type establishment in which
people smoked, the Western-style joint smoked in a private apartment was looked
down upon as the makeshift of a culture in exile. Yet it is to this culture that
the veteran Egyptian novelist Khairi Shalabi has often turned, and in his new
novel Saleh Heisa he has endeavoured to give literary shape to it. In so doing,
he has taken on board the task of documenting one of the most stimulating
periods of Egyptian cultural, social and even of political history, that which
extends from the 1950s through to the 1970s, choosing, however, to approach
events from below and to focus not on the official history but rather on the
events of individual lives.
Thus, Saleh Heisa, the subject of Shalabi's novel, is a symbol of a more
significant sort than was Soliman for the 1990s demi-monde. For the nationalist
left of the 1960s, he would have been an authentic expression of the
proletariat, and the novel skillfully describes the Cairo neighbourhood of
Ma'rouf, where he lives, in writing that no doubt owes much to actual
experience. Saleh's father, Amm Abdel-Barr, is a Nubian belonging to the haggana
camel corps, soldiers who had answered to the British occupation forces before
decolonisation. Armed with whips, they were charged with the task of dispersing
anti-British demonstrations, and, as a result, Abdel-Barr was away most of the
time when Saleh was a boy, neglecting his sprawling family. Shalabi describes
this milieu particularly effectively:
"[When Saleh was only seven years old], Khala Montaha, Saleh's mother,
found herself more and more exposed: Amm Abdel-Barr's salary was not even enough
to buy bread. She had a relation married to the bawwab of a large building in
Garden City... acquainted with an important lawyer from the town of Shebin Al-Qanater.
Discovering that he is over 60, his wife dead, his children all married and
living away,... he needs an honest, clean, well-spoken and well-mannered woman
[to clean his villa], and he will send his chauffeur to pick her up from the
building every Thursday morning, taking her back Friday evening or Saturday at
sunrise... in return for a monthly salary of LE10. Khala Montaha danced for joy,
calling on God to protect her relation against poverty or need. They agreed that
this business would remain a secret and that Amm Abdel-Barr must never catch
wind of it.
Every Thursday she took her son Saleh along, and they returned on Friday
evening, visibly better off ... For the first time in his life Saleh wore a
shirt and trousers, taking off his single, grimy and tattered galabiya... The
lawyer had taken to him like a son, buying him clothes. Saleh loved that man to
the point of worship, saying that God had given him a new father, a noble
pasha... This lawyer was in reality the greatest and most important man in Saleh
Heisa's life, his one and only tutor. He planted in him an awareness, a
knowledge, a set of morals and traits he would not have known even if he had
attended university... And he inspired him with the realisation that he was a
human being, no less worthy of pride and dignity than any other creature. And
Saleh told these things to the children in the alleyways...
The lawyer [the Ustaz] was... an important member of the Wafd Party,
well-known throughout the land... That was at the beginning of the 1940s, when
the world was upside down as a result of the Second World War, and Egypt had
quite a headache due to its decision to fight on the British side...
Demonstrations increased and became violent. Judges and lawyers in Shebin Al-Qanater
went on strike... The police tried to disperse [the demonstrators] peacefully
and failed, so started beating them... A telegram was sent for the haggana...
The haggana descended on the town centre vengefully with their whips... Saleh
tried to shield the Ustaz against the whips with his own body... But the whip
strung a belt of fire across his back... And at that instant, when he looked
away from the Ustaz and up at the brutal soldier, the whip had already lashed
the Ustaz's face."
 |
| Déjeuner
sur l'herbe Egyptian fashion (Photo from Egypt's Side-shows, Nicolaas
Biegman, London: Thames and Hudson, 1992) |
Khairi Shalabi |
|
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
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