Last Saturday, the literary arena in Egypt lost one of its most brilliant novelists, Ibrahim Aslan (1935 – 2012), who lost his life in Cairo following a severe case of bronchitis.
Last Saturday, the literary arena in Egypt lost one of its most brilliant novelists, Ibrahim Aslan (1935 – 2012), who lost his life in Cairo following a severe case of bronchitis.
Aslan was born in 1935, in the Nile Delta village of Hissat Shishbir in Tanta, shortly before his family moved south to Cairo. His father was a Post Office employee.
The Sixties Generation
Aslan emerged on the Arab literary scene in the mid-1960s, and is considered to be part of the movement known as the Sixties Generation, a vibrant group which also included such prominent modern authors as Gamal Ghitany, Sonallah Ibrahim, and Abdel-Hakim Qassem. The avant-garde literary magazine Gallery 68 published eight of his stories during its short life.
Aslan’s education was irregular. He first joined a kuttab—an informal school attached to the local mosque, which teaches the basics of religion as well as rudimentary Arabic and Arithmetic. He then moved to several schools, until he settled in a school for teaching carpet art; which he later left and enrolled in a technical school.
Like his father, Aslan went on to work for the Cairo Post Office. His experience there inspired a short story collection under the title Wardiyet Leil (Night Shift). He developed a warm relationship with the novelist Yehia Haqqi (1905 – 1992) who was his senior and who was editor-in-chief of the literary magazine al-Megallah (The Magazine). Several of Aslan’s works were printed there.
Since 1992, Aslan was culture editor at the Cairo bureau of the London-based al-Hayat newspaper.
Top works
In Cairo, Aslan lived in the underprivileged neighbourhoods of Imbaba and Kit Kat which formed the backdrop of most his works. He later moved to Muqattam where he resided until his last days.
Aslan published several volumes of short stories, novels, and assorted non-fiction during a literary career that spanned more than four decades. His first collection of short stories, called Buhayrat al-Masaa’ (The Evening Lake), was released in 1971/72. A second collection called Youssef wal-Rida’ (Joseph and the Dress) was published in 1987. In the English-speaking world, Aslan was best known for two novels: Malek al-Hazin (1983), translated under the English title The Heron, and Assafir al-Nil, translated as Nile Sparrows. The Heron was selected as one of the top 100 Arabic novels by the Arab Writers Union. Aslan’s work was also translated into French and Italian.
The indomitable blind
The Heron was turned into an award-winning film (The Kit Kat 1991) by the leading Egyptian director Daoud Abdel-Sayed. Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz played the leading role of Sheikh Hosni.
Hosni is a blind man who lives with his old mother and his frustrated son in the Kit Kat neighborhood. His son Youssef dreams of going to Europe to find work, and has a relationship with a divorced woman named Fatma. Sheikh Hosni refuses to admit his handicap or give way to it. He also spends his nights smoking marijuana with the locals in order to forget his miseries after the loss of his wife and selling his father’s house. He knows everything about his neighbors; their secrets and love affairs. The film ends in an unforgettable scene of Sheikh Hosni blazing through the street on a motorcycle like every sighted person, achieving thus a long-unattained dream.
The film was a huge success, and became one of the landmarks in the Egyptian cinema in the 1990s. The character of Sheikh Hosni became a role model for the blind, and was emulated in several other Egyptian films.
Well-earned prizes
More recently, Magdi Ahmed Ali directed the film version of Assafir al-Nil, under the title Nile Birds (2009). The film depicted the state of defeat lived by cancer patients and marginalised people, who frequently find no way out of their misery but to indulge in physical relations with the other sex. It also predicted with the clashes between the young demonstrators and security forces; an image that materialised during the January Revolution in 2011.
Aslan won a number of literary prizes, including the Taha Hussein Award from the University of Minya in 1989 and the Egyptian State Incentive Prize in 2003-2004. Most recently, he won the 2006 Sawiris Prize for his book Hikayat min Fadlallah Uthman (Stories of Fadlallah Uthman).
With Aslan’s departure, the marginalised in Egypt have lost a sincere spokesperson on their behalf.