The
Poetics of Amnesia in
Khaled Osman's debut novel Le Caire à corps perdu
Son Eldorado à lui, c’était
le monde ancien dont il avait été extrait trop tôt pour pouvoir en
vivre la plénitude.
[His Eldorado was that old world from which he had been uprooted too
soon for him to be able to fully appreciate it.
Khaled Osman (Le Caire à corps perdu 139)
Le Caire à corps perdu1 [Cairo in
a lost Body] is the debut novel by the Egyptian-French author Khaled
Osman, a Paris based novelist and celebrated translator of such eminent
literary figures as Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz and Gamal Ghitany.
The novel portrays an Egyptian who, after years spent in France,
decides to return to Egypt. Upon his arrival in Cairo, he suffers a
concussion that leaves him disabled and helpless, unable to remember
his name or any components of his identity. As he attempts to
reconstruct his identity, the reader witnesses the chaotic meanders of
a city that never sleeps. Evidently, all the features that led to the
2011 Egyptian Revolution are enmeshed in the narrative: bureaucratic
corruption, tyranny of the faces of power, and lack of civil liberties.
Osman takes the reader in a maelstrom of impressions, emotions, and
intricate social rapports in a narrative marked by intertextuality, one
of the keys to the regain of identity, what I call "the poetics of
amnesia" in the title of the essay.2
The aim of this essay is to delineate the paradoxical particularities
of the protagonist’s amnesia, with the consequent loss of identity, and
the subsequent chase to recover this identity. At the outset of this
quest, the possibility of reverse migration—He was born in Cairo and
moved to France with his parents as a young child—is highly suggested,
though not definitely established. Keeping in mind that readers may not
have access to the untranslated French novel, the plot analysis that
follows, informed by the aforementioned aim, is deemed necessary.
Soon after he faints with fatigue, hitting his head against a tool box
in the taxi that drives him from the airport, the unconscious
protagonist is carried and deposited by the frightened taxi driver on a
bench in front of a modest looking boarding house. In his haste to get
rid of such liability and for fear of reprisals, the cab driver
forgets, in the back seat, the jacket which contains the passenger’s
identity papers. However, moments later, the protagonist is taken in
and befriended by the kindly head of the boarding house, Sett Baheya,
and by her caring lodgers: Faouzi, a student of medicine, Azza, a
student of political science, Ibrahim, the concierge, and Khadra, the
maid. They all agree to name him, for the time being, Nassi, which
means in Arabic "the one who has forgotten," and they devise strategies
to help him recover his lost identity.
In point of fact, Nassi’s seems to be a case of post traumatic
retrograde amnesia, where the victim may not be able to remember her
name, her place of residence or any events that occurred prior to the
injury, but can still recall scattered incidents going back all the way
to childhood. That is precisely Nassi’s predicament: He remembers
visiting his grandparents in Cairo every summer as a child (where from,
he does not know, though he suspects it is from "somewhere in Europe"),
and he evokes sensorial impressions from those yearly visits such as
city walks that always ended with a refreshing ice cream or iced
lemonade drunk in the scorching summer heat of the metropole. Moreover,
unable to name his country of residence, his or any of the names of his
relatives or friends, Nassi can spontaneously recall the name of a
protagonist in a novel and he can recite Arabic poems that illustrate
the emotions he is experiencing or the situations he finds himself in
at a given moment during his search. He also recalls sequences from
movies he saw in the past, sequences that corroborate his present
experience.
Those incongruous memories act as objective correlatives, whose
function is to show and suggest, rather than describe, feelings and
emotions. One such instance is worth mentioning.
One day, Nassi thinks of going to the French Consulate in Cairo to
apply for a job as translator, but mainly to request that they check
their records abroad to see if he is possibly a citizen of France, as
he suspects he could be. He hesitates taking this step, however, and he
is plagued by doubt: What if he is rejected on both sides, Egypt and
France? France because he would be deemed an impostor, and Egypt
because of his state of amnesia which would prevent him from securing a
place in this society; then he could find himself, as the Egyptian
expression goes, "like the woman who danced between two floors. Neither
those above nor those below saw her" (121-122). Rejected by both
countries, Nassi feared to end up in a "no man’s land" identity-wise,
"condemned to wander indefinitely" (121) like the heroes of a Tunisian
movie he once saw.
The movie recalled3 is about two foreigners, a Polish and an
Arab, who embark on a ferry in Ostende (Belgium) en route to Dover
(England). After humiliating interrogations by British Police and a
long wait, they are both refused entry to Great Britain and sent back
to Belgium. There, again in Ostende, they are also refused entry
because their visas have expired, so the two characters find themselves
neither here nor there, in limbo, waiting indefinitely in the port of
Ostende. Whereupon, the Arab character, Yousef Quraichi, outraged and
offended in his Arab pride and refusing to plead and beg, decides to
write a dignified letter in the form of a poetic missive, addressed to
the Arab ambassador in Belgium:
A notre ambassadeur arabe
à l’étranger,
Nous avons quitté la
terre,
Nous nous sommes embarqués
Et derrière nous, le pont
s’est brisé.
Mais un jour viendra
Où tu t’apercevras
Qu’il n’est rien de plus
terrible que l’infini,
Lorsque toute terre est
irrémédiablement bannie (122).
[To our Arab ambassador
abroad,
We left the land,
We have embarked,
And behind us the bridge
collapsed.
But the day will come
When you will own
That nothing is more
terrible than the infinite,
When all land is
irrevocably banished].
"Nothing is more terrible than the
infinite/When all land is irrevocably banished",
a poignant and telling predicament of the refugee in between lands,
forever branded an unwelcomed alien, forever hounded by fear! It is
also the Kafkaesque nightmare Nassi faces.
Once he makes it to the French Consulate with his dual request, it is
an utter fiasco. Nassi is evidently unable to even begin to fill in the
application with all the required basic personal information, and
indeed, he is deemed an impostor seeking illegal entry into France.
Needless to say, he is not given a job as translator.
Meanwhile, his co-lodgers are doing their utmost to help him navigate
through his selective amnesia.
When taken through the streets of Cairo by his friends, in a desperate
attempt to recover his identity by rekindling memories of his past
whereabouts, he ends up recognizing the building where his grandparents
lived. Alas, it is condemned and boarded up, and no one inhabits it any
longer. Nassi laments that Cairo too suffers amnesia, having eradicated
some of the places he cherished so: "Le pays tout entier est en train
d’oublier son passé" [the entire country is forgetting its past"], an
apt allusion to the deterioration of the living conditions over the
last four decades. Standing in front of that condemned building,
nevertheless, isolated memories come back vividly to Nassi, of the day
when a neighbor learned of the sudden death of her son and her screams
of grief. Or another day when he himself fell off the balcony and
survived the fall witnessed by his terrified mother and aunts. He also
remembers places where he used to eat with his family, and even the
foul (fava beans) stand with the humorous sign put up by the owner: "If
we run out of beans, I am responsible by no means (90)." The chase for
his identity in the company of his friends through the insanity of the
traffic and the immensely crowded streets, makes of Cairo a stark
antagonist, and that, despite the endearing memories the city evokes in
the protagonist.
As the narrative unfolds, one gets the impression that Nassi’s amnesia,
on a symbolic level, is an escape from his life as an Expatriate, one
he was keen to put behind him. His amnesia is the objective correlative
of a deep dissatisfaction with expatriation and the embodiment of his
nostalgia for his native land, to which the epigraph to this paper
testifies. In fact, we learn, at the very opening of the narrative,
that his initial decision to come back to Egypt was motivated by his
disillusionment with Europe: The regulated, productive lives, the petty
complaints of well-fed individuals who plead poverty at the least
breach made to their comfort. He was getting increasingly annoyed by
the "cult of performance and efficiency" (23), and the resulting
"fierce individualism" that isolated people from each other (203). The
chaos and vibrancy embedded in Cairo, on the other hand, called and
appealed to him in his exile: "Il avait éprouvé un besoin impérieux de
revenir à la simplicité, aux verres de thé sirotés entre amis, aux
promenades sur la corniche du Nil, à l’imprévoyance et au fatalisme."
(37). [He had felt an imperious need to come back to simplicity, to the
cups of tea enjoyed with friends, to walks by the Nile, to lack of
planning, to fatalism]. As he gets to know his co-lodgers, he is moved
by their constant solicitude, their human warmth, and their
unconditional support. So perhaps this loss of identity was a blessing
in disguise after all. In Nassi’s own words: "Malgré toute son horreur,
cette amnésie provisoire avait tout de même du bon: elle lui permettait
de renouer directement avec son enfance en passant outre les idées
noires, les angoisses et les appréhensions qui encombraient
ordinairement son esprit" (37) [Despite all its horror, this temporary
amnesia had a good side to it: It would allow him to reconnect directly
with his youth by sidelining the dark thoughts, anguish, and
apprehensions that normally cluttered his mind]. In this quotation, a
sort of nostalgia towards the native land transpires. "To reconnect
directly with his youth" is the dream of everyone past the prime of
life, and in this particular case, the dream of Nassi in quest of his
stolen identity in the city of his birth.
Nassi’s double exile, his "metaphorical exile"4
in Cairo succeeding his physical exile in Europe, is exacerbated by
Raouf Effendi, a civil servant who kindly helps him in his quest by
sifting through national registers and archives in search of someone
who could prove to be him. Thus, Raouf has shortlisted three possible
contenders to Nassi’s identity, who are all around his medically
estimated age. In his efforts to help, Raouf presents our protagonist
with the identity files of the three prospects, with the last one
corresponding in many ways to Nassi’s attributes and trajectory.
However, and despite Faouzi’s insistence, Nassi vehemently refuses to
embrace the identity of that man who allegedly spied on his fellow
Egyptian Expatriates in France and reported back to National Security
in Egypt, an oppressive, ruthless, corrupt, and unethical entity. When
Faouzi insists that his find is a most likely candidate, Nassi
heatedly argues that a human being cannot possibly be reduced to his
trajectory. Rather, it is one’s convictions and values ["these don’t
lie"] that constitute the true makers of our being (237), hence the
impossibility for him, Nassi, who values freedom and integrity above
all, to be that slimy individual who colluded with an oppressive
government and spied on his countrymen residing abroad.
In regards to Nassi’s delineation of what constitutes the core of our
identity, one has the impression that Nassi is Khaled Osman’s
spokesman. In fact, in an interview I conducted with the author in
2013, he engaged the topic of the philosophical dimension of the novel:
which are the elements crucial to one’s identity, those elements one
can possibly hold on to when one’s bearings are all lost or confounded?
an issue certainly relevant in the context of migration and
transnational bicultural individuals. In the narrower context of the
novel’s plot, it is relevant insofar as the protagonist, despite
disabling amnesia, retains a strong sense of self. It is almost as if
his disability has some liberating power to it.
Indeed, at the end of the novel, (...) he is motivated by his fear of
going back to Europe, the fear, as he puts it, "to fall back in the
trap of this uprooted existence he precisely tried to escape, to the
point of losing his memory" (251). (...)Is this a desperate move on the
part of an out-of-place transnational, forever in between countries,
stranger everywhere, homesick wherever he goes, and belonging to no
collectivity whatsoever? "Au fond, il n’a jamais su trouver sa place,
et ce qui lui arrive en ce moment ne fait qu’entériner tragiquement un
état de fait préexistant"(125) [In reality, he never found his place,
and his present state of amnesia reinforces a preexisting point of
fact]. Nassi’s decision (... may appear as a willingness) to finally
re-appropriate his past by reintegrating his lost and found identity
(253).
In conclusion, what I have termed "poetics of amnesia" in the title of
this essay can be considered as a conglomerate of features tied to
Nassi’s lack of memory. The loss of key facts of his identity (name,
date of birth, country of residence, occupation, parents’ names, etc.)
are juxtaposed with an uncanny remembrance of chunks of poems, and of
songs and moviesthat mark the narrative with intertextuality. These
snatches of memories act as objective correlatives of the ills of his
expatriation in France and his nostalgia for Egypt. Nassi’s remembrance
of incidents and impressions experienced as a child during the yearly
summer visits to his grandparents in Cairo are perhaps predictors of
the possibility of his reverse migration, as suggested at the outset of
the novel. This is further suggested by his (ultimate) decision ...as
perhaps) Nassi will reconcile his parents’ decision to expatriate when
he was only a young child with a redefinition of his transnational
identity, for, in the words of Eric Liu, "in every assimilation there
is a mutiny against history-but there is also a destiny, which is to
redefine history."5
Notes
1. Khaled Osman, Le Caire à corps perdu. Paris: Vents d’ailleurs: 2011.
This novel was a finalist for a prestigious Francophone award, Prix
Gitanjali. Khaled Osman has just published his second novel, La Colombe
et le moineau (The Dove and the Sparrow) in 2016 at Vents d’ailleurs.
Osman is recipient of many prestigious awards by the French Academy and
other institutions for his fine translations of Naguib Mahfouz and
Gamal Ghitany.
2. All translations are mine. This novel is yet to be tanslated.
3. It is a 1982 Tunisian movie entitled Traversées by Mahmoud Ben
Mahmoud. Throughout the novel, the title of the poems/poets quoted and
the names of movies mentioned are never given in the body of the novel,
but only in the end-notes.
4. An expression coined by the late postcolonial critic, Edward Said,
in a liminal collection of essays, Representations of the Intellectual:
The 1993 Reith Lectures. London: Vintage, 1994.
5. Eric Liu, "Notes of a Native Speaker;"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/middleground/liu.htm.
F. Elizabeth Dahab is Professor of Comparative Literature in the
Department of Comparative World Literature and Classics at California
State University, Long Beach. She has given numerous talks and
published a number of research articles in her fields of
specialization, as well as a book on exilic Canadian/Québécois
literature of Arabic provenance, titled Voices of Exile in Contemporary
Canadian Francophone Literature. She is also a poet (French/English),
though her poetry is largely unpublished.
Elizabeth
Dahab, étude publiée dans le dernier n° (décembre 2016) de la revue en ligne "Wordgathering", dédiée au thème du
handicap en littérature.
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