Abstract
Short-story writer Eman Abdelrahim
CREDIT: Eman Abdelrahim
Although she declines to call herself either a feminist or a political activist, her stories tell of the struggles of Arab women to find their place in a world where they are torn between the conservative society they were brought up in and the liberation which events such as the Arab Spring promised. Her tales also touch on taboo subjects like mental illness.
Her short story Laugh and the World Laughs with Me, an extract of which is published in English below, is the intimate story of a woman who has a schizophrenic brother. It is set against the backdrop of the demonstrations in Tahrir Square.
The main character, Fadwa, works as a presenter for the BBC Arabic Service and the 2011 uprising, playing out on the television in the family’s flat, provides a soundtrack to the domestic action. But her brother, Shadi, is plagued by demons. He believes there are secret messages being sent to him through the news.
Fadwa is struggling between her job, her domestic obligations to her brother and father and her desire to take part in the revolution happening in the streets.
Many of Abdelrahim’s stories present women’s dilemmas in surreal ways. She tells tales of brides in black, secret staircases and threatening male strangers in wolf masks. Her first short-story collection, Rooms and Other Stories, won her accolades including a Sawaris Cultural Award for emerging writers in 2015. The literary website Lithub identified her as one of the top 10 female Arab writers who should be translated into English.
Her main influences are the Russian greats Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and she sees parallels between Egyptian society today and 19th century Tsarist Russia.
Now 37, Abdelrahim started writing anonymous blogs in her early 20s. The daughter of a teacher and a nurse, she lived with her parents and five younger siblings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, until she was 15.
The family was plunged into crisis when her father was killed in a car accident shortly after they all returned to Cairo. Her mother had no way of supporting them and remarried quickly. She divorced after setting up her own property business.
Abdelrahim completed university, where she studied business, and worked for an import-export company. She wrote in her spare time, moving from writing blogs to finding her voice composing fictional stories on Facebook. Encouraged by her friends, she used her dreams as inspiration. She was rebelling, too. She took off her hijab, curled her hair – and then cut it all off.
“I was at war with everything. I was conservative and I became the opposite,” she explained. “I used to smoke in public. This was a big problem... a big thing.”
People in the street used to think that, because of the way she looked and behaved, she must be a foreigner. She also became mentally ill and her psychiatrist encouraged her to write as a way of healing.
Now married to a German anthropologist, she lives in Chemnitz and is writing stories inspired by her mother, who died last year.
But Abdelrahim is still surprised that she’s a writer. “I loved writing. Nothing else,” she said. “I never considered anyone would read it. I am writing for me as a reader.”
The extract from Abdelrahim’s short story Laugh and the World Laughs with Me is published below. ®
Laugh and the World Laughs with Me
On the morning of the following day, Shadi has not slept, as is normal for him these days. He is crying hard and begs Fadwa not to leave the house. He kneels down to kiss her feet. Fadwa sits on a chair in the living room and tells him that she will not go out, in compliance with his wishes. She takes advantage of his going to the bathroom and leaves quickly and closes the door behind her.
After midday, The Battle of the Camels begin. Fadwa follows the events from her workplace and she receives calls and pleas for help from the square. She moves around, she comes and goes, and through all that, tears keep pouring down her face until, in time, she forgets that she is crying.
At sunset, she replies to her father who has called her on her mobile. She hears him start to cry, she takes a breath and says: “Have you seen, Dad, what the heathen sons of dogs have done?!... Never mind, Dad, the blood of those people will not be wasted.” Her father’s voice on the other end is breaking up. He tells her that he is crying for the sake of her brother, who ran away from him when he was trying to take him to the doctor in accordance with the plan that he had agreed with her. Her father tells her that her brother is now missing altogether, he does not have an ID card on him, nor a mobile – not even any small change in his pocket. Her father begs her for help, saying that he doesn’t know what he should do. Fadwa takes her handbag and leaves the radio station in a hurry without even asking permission. She gets in her car and drives around the streets searching for Shadi. She calls her father – who is also out searching – from time to time.
She drives around the main roads and narrow side streets of Ayn Shams where Rim, his ex-girlfriend, lives. At three in the morning she is driving her car along Rameses Street when a friend of hers calls to tell her about a sniper and countless deaths and injuries. Fadwa gets out close to the Ghamra metro station and sits on the pavement. She slaps her face several times. Fadwa smacks herself and screams, her tears mingle with her snot in the pitch-dark of the completely empty street. Her mobile rings again. Her father asks her to come back home and tells her that Shadi is now with him and that they are on their way to the hospital.
Fadwa will learn from her father when he returns that the army contacted him to ask him if he knew anyone called Shadi and requested that he head for the airport immediately to take him back. When Shadi arrives, the father finds him barefoot. His clothes are ripped and he has multiple wounds. He will learn from the captain that he was beaten up by people in the Sheraton compound who thought that he was off his head, and the army only managed to rescue him from their hands by the skin of their teeth, realising belatedly that he was not fully in his right mind, and were able by some miracle to find out his name and the mobile number that they called him on.
CREDIT: Otto Dettmer/Ikon
The father gets in the car after helping the exhausted Shadi to stretch out on the back seat. The captain, speaking only to him, says: “Take good care of him, Hajj, it would be a shame to let someone in that state out on his own in these troubled times.” The father wipes away a tear that he can’t fight back and takes Shadi to the hospital.
Neither the father nor Fadwa know that Shadi fled from his father in the morning in order to rescue Fadwa, who had been detained with the hostages when she went out that morning. The hostages were all together in the Al-Fateh mosque and the President’s men kept smuggling them from mosque to mosque to prevent Shadi, their saviour, from arriving to rescue them. They finally came to a stop in a mosque in the Sheraton compound and Shadi managed to trick his way into it before it was evacuated at the time of evening prayer. The hostages were praying at the time, pleading with Allah to rescue them from the situation they were in. Shadi interrupted their prayers and freed them all. He punched some of them, but that didn’t matter because it was all for their benefit at the end of the day. When Shadi was sure they had all left the mosque and were safe, he finally left the mosque himself and was met outside by the dogs of State Security wearing plain clothes. They showered blows down on him, then handed him over to the Republican Guard who, in their turn, gave him a good beating. When Rim learnt from her family what was happening to him, she asked the devil to call his soldiers off him and threatened that otherwise she would desert him. The devil acquiesced to her command, and requested that the President let Shadi go, so the President immediately gave an order to the Republican Guard to phone his father so that he could come and take charge of him.
The Battle of the Camels, when supporters of the then President Hosni Mubarak attacked protestors on Tahrir Square with metal weapons, heavy rocks and Molotov cocktails, 1 February 2011
CREDIT: Chris Hondros/Getty
A week later, on the Thursday, Fadwa would receive leaked information, in the course of her work, of a report that the President had stepped down that night. She hurriedly finishes her work and decides to go home to listen to the speech with her father so that they can share in the joy together.
At twenty minutes to ten at night, she is downloading a set of the most famous patriotic songs onto her computer at home. She connects a speaker to the computer, and decides that the celebration will be loud and last until dawn.
After the speech, Fadwa was trying to stand up, but she just couldn’t. She thought of calling out for her father, then gave up the idea, out of pity for his state of health. She told herself that that was the last thing he needed. She kept quiet, and after several minutes she tried again to stand up, but she still couldn’t do it. She burst into silent tears, after which she fell asleep where she was, sitting on the chair. She felt her father waking her up and leading her to her bed. She wanted to know what the time was, but she could not see the clock, she was just focused on the fact that she was actually walking now with her father.
The following day she sees a brilliant video on the computer telling the story of the events of the revolution from the very beginning. She feels deeply moved and tears run down her face. She prays: “Oh, Lord, we did what we had to do, now you must play your part, oh Lord.” Her father is sitting in the living room watching terrestrial TV, when she hears a collective roar from the street and the neighbours, like the one you hear when the national team scores a goal in an African Nations Cup match. She runs out to the living room and finds her father prostrate, crying, on the floor. She follows with unbelieving eyes the breaking news titles on the TV reporting the news of the resignation. She starts to jump up and down like a crazy woman. She is yelling, believing that she is trilling cries of joy, but she doesn’t know how to do that so she just keeps on yelling. Her father watches her, sitting on the floor, and laughs amid his tears.
She prances back to the computer and starts playing the patriotic songs that she downloaded yesterday, at top volume. She dances, she jumps and carries on shouting, her father comes into her room, smiling at her, dancing with her, then hugs her and cries.
The following day, in the afternoon, when Fadwa has finished getting dressed, she goes out, accompanied by her father, to bring Shadi back from the hospital, where he has spent ten days receiving intensive treatment. Shadi is calm now. His face is bloated from so much sleep and he has almost zero ability to concentrate because of the high dosage of strong medication that he has been on.
Once home, Shadi sits in front of the TV. He watches for himself the resignation speech, which all the channels are broadcasting on continuous repeat. Fadwa sits at his side. He laughs and points at the man standing behind Omar Suleiman and says to Fadwa: “Why is that man there doing that?”
Fadwa notices for the first time the man with his scowling face and suspicious penetrating glances, and she laughs too.
Shadi asks her about dinner and she tells him that they will get a Kentucky Fried Chicken takeaway tonight. He asks her to order the 68-piece meal for him and she laughs and tells him that she’s ordered the 116-piece one for him, then he laughs too.
After a few minutes they watch the speech, which is being shown again. Shadi looks contemplatively at Omar Suleiman then turns to Fadwa, saying: “Can you believe it? That Suleiman was using black magic too?” Fadwa looks aghast and the delight drains from her face, indeed her right eye flickers in a nervous movement that she can’t control. Shadi observes her reaction and bursts out laughing and says: “I’m kidding you, you idiot.” She smiles slowly and cautiously, and his giggles grow louder and he repeats it to her, struggling to breathe from his laughter. “I swear to God, and even on the life of our father.” She contemplates his non-stop laughter, then she laughs too, until tears fill her eyes, and the sound of their intermingled laughter fills the space of the living room.
Footnotes
This is an extract of Laugh and the World Laughs with Me. The full short story will appear on indexoncensorship.org in July
Translated by