Ahdaf Soueif

thumb|Soueif in 2009 Ahdaf Soueif (March 23, 1950) is an Egyptian novelist and political and cultural commentator. Quotes I now find myself looking at every sentence, every image, that purports to tell the West about the Arabs and the Muslims with this question in mind: to what extent does it feed into existing stereotypes and established prejudice? from “It Matters” (2003) collected in Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground The Map of Love (1999 novel) — and there, on the table under her bedroom window, lies the voice that has set her dreaming again. Fragments of a life lived a long, long time ago. Across a hundred years the woman’s voice speaks to her — so clearly that she cannot believe it is not possible to pick up her pen and answer. (first lines) Put football instead of cricket and she could have been me. She could have been Arwa, or Deena or any of the girls I grew up with here in Cairo in the Sixties. What difference do a hundred years — or a continent — make? We always know how the story ends. What we don't know is what happens along the way. “So. Tell me. What do you think? Which is better? To take action and perhaps make a fatal mistake - or to take no action and die slowly anyway?” “If people can write to each other across space, why can they not write across time too?” It is that happy stretch of time when the lovers set to chronicling their passion. When no glance, no tone of voice is so fleeting but it shines with significance. When each moment, each perception is brought out with care, unfolded like a precious gem from its layers of the softest tissue paper and laid in front of the beloved — turned this way and that, examined, considered. And so they sit, and touch, and talk, and breathe, and so they string their moments into a glorious chain, and throw it round each other's necks, garland each other with it. Invisible to all others, it shines for them, a beacon across a crowded room, across an ocean, across time. “Sometimes I think, because we use the same words, we assume we mean the same thing” There have been those among us who have been so dazzled by the might and technological wizardy of Europe that they have been rather a man who stands lost in admiration at the gun that is raised to shoot him. How can it strike so suddenly? Without warning, without preparation? Should it not grow on you, taking its time, so that when the moment comes when you think 'I love', you know or at least you imagine you know what it is you love? How can it be that a set of the shoulders, the rhythm of a stride, the shadow of a strand of hair falling on a forehead can cause the tides of the heart to ebb and to flow? It can't be that bad. Surely it can't be that bad. There must be a way, only we can't see it yet. A way of making a space for ourselves where we can make the best of ourselves - we just can't quite see it yet. But things move on and by the time you've plotted your position the world around you has changed and you're running - panting to catch up. How can you think clearly when you're running? That is the beauty of the past; there it lies on the table: journals, pictures, a candle-glass, a few books of history. You leave it and come back to it and it waits for you - unchanged. You can turn back the pages, look again at the beginning. You can leaf forward and know the end. And you tell the story that they, the people who lived it, could only tell in part. Sandpiper (1996 story collection) That narrow stretch of sand knows nothing in the world better than it does the white waves that whip it , caress it , collapse on to it . The white foam knows nothing better than those sands which wait for it , rise to it and suck it in .but what do the waves know of the massed, hot, still sands of the desert just twenty , no , ten feet beyond the scalloped edge ? And what does the beach knows of depths, the cold, the currents just there, where-do you see it? - Where the water turns a deeper blue. (from “Sandpiper”) I think of you often. I think of you often, and I remember. (beginning of "I Think of You") In the Eye of the Sun (1992 novel) She had been wrong to think it wouldn't matter that much to him, yes, he took her for granted, of course he did , but he took her for granted - not like an old coat in the corner of a dark cupboard, as she'd put it to herself, but like the very air that he breathed. How wonderful to simply do things instead of wondering if they are worth doing or discussing whether to do them or being told not to do them or listening to somebody else describe doing them. “You know, I've been thinking: all the women in the books you like -- Sartre and Camus and all that -- they don't really exist. Not as people. They're only there to wait for the men. To love them and be loved back or not -- mostly not; to be beaten up or killed; to appear as a face on the wall of Meurseault's cell--” Aisha (1983 story collection) It was too cold to dream (“1964”) I remember a time of happy, dappled sunlight. (first line of "Knowing") I had watched them carefully over the years. Sometimes they argued. But less and less as time went by. Aisha learnt to be careful. To avoid certain subjects. To avoid enthusiasms, excesses, tears. To avoid - me. It was not that she was afraid of him. I believe she was afraid for him; afraid of me. And she wanted to go on loving him. (beginning of "The Nativity") from interviews/conversations Maybe not a hydra because that’s really, really nasty. I think there was almost a false head: we ripped open the packaging and now we’re faced with the real thing that’s there in the box… On the state of Egypt after the ousting of Mubarak in “INTERVIEW WITH AHDAF SOUEIF” in The White Review (March 2012) …A work of fiction lives by empathy – the extending of my self into another's, the willingness to imagine myself in someone else's shoes. This itself is a political act: empathy is at the heart of much revolutionary action… On how fiction should be empathetic in “Ahdaf Soueif: In times of crisis, fiction has to take a back seat” in The Guardian (2012 Aug 17) …In Egypt, in the decade of slow, simmering discontent before the revolution, novelists produced texts of critique, of dystopia, of nightmare. Now, we all seem to have given up – for the moment – on fiction. On political upheaval is affecting fictional works in “Ahdaf Soueif: In times of crisis, fiction has to take a back seat” in The Guardian (2012 Aug 17) …Most people are content to live their lives within prescribed and personal boundaries. But one of the points of artists surely is that they live outside their skin. That they're connected. That they hurt with the hurt of their fellow humans. How, then, can they disengage? How can you – if your task, if your gift, is narrative – absent yourself from the great narrative of the world?... On the question of what an artist is responsible for in “Ahdaf Soueif: In times of crisis, fiction has to take a back seat” in The Guardian (2012 Aug 17) Quotes about writers who moved to Britain in their youth struck a special chord with me as outsiders grappling with issues similar to my own—Abdulrazak Gurnah, Buchi Emecheta, Ahdaf Soueif. Leila Aboulela, Interview with World Literature Today (2019) In the Eye of the Sun is...something of a landmark. It is the first novel I know of that successfully renders an Arab, Egyptian Muslim reality in English. Without losing the authentic tones, images, voices and complicated politics of Arabic life, Soueif manages to assimilate that world seamlessly into the familiar universe of the English language and the imaginative and moral world of English literature -- a literature in which her narrator is steeped...In the Eye of the Sun is a tour de force, a bold and important work raising major issues in Western-Arab literature and the post-colonial novel. Leila Ahmed, review in The Washington Post (1993) Historical visions of Arab women have been dominated by the Western-generated frenzy over the odalisque, the favorite subject of many European artists, such as Matisse, Ingres, and Delacroix...Her image still pervades Western conceptions of the East as lazy, sensual, exotic, and willing to succumb--the same image that Arab women writers like Ahdaf Soueif and Leila Sebbar seek to reconstruct...The examples of these two writers illustrate the effort of Arab women to reclaim their identities and correct a historically maligned portrait. Susan Muaddi Darraj. "Understanding the Other Sister: The Case of Arab Feminism" in Monthly Review (March 2002) In this small-scale and intimate first collection of stories by Ahdaf Soueif there is a remarkably productive, somewhat depressing tension between the anecdotal surface of modern, Westernised Egyptian life and the troubling, often violent but always persisting traditional forms beneath...The transformation of the ideological, the political and the contemporary into the retrospective intensity of fetishes, rituals and fantasies framed by the biography of a woman neither entirely Arab nor entirely English is Soueif's theme. The distance and unfulfilment expressed by the stories is part of their strange appeal, which is maintained by a kind of 'white' writing, calling attention less to its often outré material than to its controlled matter-of-factness. For Soueif's material is by no means ordinary, nor is her formal concern lackadaisical. When, in the last story, she creates a Fellini-like surrealism out of exorcism (the zar), her spare prose is admirably harnessed to a climax that is both understated and terrifying. Still, if in the future she returns to her Egyptian material, she will have to confront its inherently political charge. Edward Said, review of Aisha (1983) External links personal website The Guardian archives Goodreads page Category:Translators from Egypt Category:Political commentators from Egypt Category:Cultural critics Category:1950 births Category:Living people Category:Novelists from Cairo Category:Women from Egypt