So You May See

Mona Prince, Raphaël Cohen

Description

Passion, unconventional romance, and the determination of a strong female character to live her life freely.
Passion, unconventional romance, and the determination of a strong female character to live her life freely.
This audacious novel opens with Ayn as she reflects on the act of writing and wonders if love alone is sufficient subject for a narrative. Haltingly at first, she weaves the tale of her love affair with Ali with witty asides about her own writing, and the limits and self-deceptions that are at the heart of all storytelling. As the story finds its way, through sea and desert, and the realms of mysticism and magic, we learn of a passionate, volatile relationship, one severely tested through countless separations, of Ayn's relationships with other men, including her intense encounters with a Corsican ex-convict, and of her own desire to escape the confines of marriage, even to the man she loves. Disarmingly candid in the telling, So You May See leads us gently into a revolt, a fierce rebuttal of conventional romantic literature and an indictment of the sexual mores and unquestioned attitudes to marriage and relationships in contemporary Egypt.

Sujets

• Fiction
• Romance

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617971761
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in 2011 by
The American University in Cairo Press
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
www.aucpress.com
Copyright © 2008 by Mona Prince
First published in Arabic in 2008 as Inni uhaddithuka li-tara
Protected under the Berne Convention
English translation copyright © 2011 by Raphael Cohen
[Extract on page XX is from Ibrahim al-Koni, Fitnat al-zu’an etc; add FSG copyright line if Barthes permission granted]
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Dar el Kutub No. 15019/10
eISBN: 978 161 797 176 1
Prince, Mona
So You May See / Mona Prince; Translated by Raphael Cohen. — Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2011
p. cm.
eISBN: 978 161 797 176 1
1. Arabic Fiction I. Cohen, Raphael (Tr.) II. Title
892.73
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 15 14 13 12 11
Designed by Sebastian Schönenstein
Printed in Egypt
Prologue
I often said to him: I will immortalize you; I will create a myth out of you.
I will write about you and me, about our love story.
He would mock me with his words: You don’t know how to write.
I teased him: Has someone loved you and written about you before? He humbly said no. My presumption would increase, and I would say: Well then, that person will be me. He would assert that I don’t know how to write. I’d be quick to stifle him: You’re not a literary critic, you don’t even read literature. You’re only interested in the news, politics, and soccer. Leave talk of writing to others.
Perhaps I don’t know how to embellish my style; perhaps I don’t relate to flowery language and, for that reason, refuse to use it. Whatever the case, I will still try to write this love story.
Initially, I wanted to write a novel about this love affair, but found the subject to be inconsequential. A novel about love! Could I add anything fresh to a subject already treated by great writers and philosophers? Even though I lived, and continue to live, this love with my whole being, my experience is still too limited to philosophize and theorize on the topic. In addition to this, there is the notion that a novel isn’t a novel unless it deals with big issues and is leavened with ideology.
I thought, then, that love wasn’t a sufficient subject to warrant the writing of a novel. So I decided to subsume it within a travel narrative. In the end the journey would be internal, a voyage of discovery or quest for some form of salvation through my physical transition from place to place; an exploration of the self and the other, the here and the there. Plus a fair amount of politics, sociology, psychology, and erotica, all of which are exciting features: a tried-and-tested recipe for fame and translation.
After I had settled on this form, I had second thoughts. I found myself rejecting all the conventional forms that I was familiar with and all the issues and subjects where I lacked experience.
I will write my love story just as it is, incomplete, and from my, sometimes less than objective, point of view. I no longer need someone to give me a voice, to adopt my perspective, or to speak on my behalf. I have a voice. I will make an effort, in accordance with my ability or my understanding, to make room for the perspective of my co-partner in the story. Let them accuse me of subjectivity and romanticism, which is no bad thing either. I will write passages based upon moments I lived through without adhering to a specific form. The passage may take the form of a narrative, a prose poem, a quotation from other texts, or a letter. A section may be long, one line, or one word; in the literary register or colloquial; with a fair deal of sarcastic asides or critical interventions that sometimes undermine what I’m writing. Well-defined form no longer concerns me. What concerns me now is to gamble at writing as I gambled at love: with even greater audacity, I will go wild with writing like I went wild with love.
Ayn
Dedication
To Ali . . .
The light by which God illuminated my heart
On Dedication
“P owerless to utter itself, powerless to speak, love nonetheless wants to proclaim itself, to exclaim, to write itself everywhere. . . . And once the amorous subject creates or puts together any kind of work at all, he is seized with a desire to dedicate it . . . .
Yet, except for the case of the Hymn, which combines the dedication and the text itself, what follows the dedication (i.e., the work itself) has little relation to this dedication. The object I give is no longer tautological (I give you what I give you), it is interpretable ; it has a meaning (meanings) . . . ; though I write your name on my work, it is for ‘them’ that it has been written (the others, the readers). Hence it is by a fatality of writing itself that we cannot say of a text that it is ‘amorous,’ but only, at best, that it has been created ‘amorously,’ like a cake or an embroidered slipper. And even: less than a slipper! For the slipper has been made for your foot (your size and your pleasure); the cake has been made or selected for your taste. . . . Writing is dry, obtuse; a kind of steamroller, writing advances, indifferent, indelicate, and would kill ‘father, mother, lover’ rather than deviate from its fatality . . . ; there is no benevolence within writing, rather a terror: it smothers the other, who, far from perceiving the gift in it, reads there instead an assertion of mastery, of power, of pleasure, of solitude. Whence the cruel paradox of the dedication: I seek at all costs to give you what smothers you.”
Roland Barthes: A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
1.
I n Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being , Tomas remembers that his love for Tereza was born as a result of a string of laughable coincidences: six o’clock; the novel Anna Karenina ; a particular bench in the park, which was situated opposite the restaurant where Tereza worked; and two others that I don’t recall now. He had been thinking, somewhat discontentedly and indifferently, how blind coincidences had led him to this woman who had become the love of his life, he a man who didn’t believe in love and could never get enough of women.
Was it coincidence? Is there really something called coincidence, be it blind or otherwise, or is it a kind of higher arrangement, this simultaneity and succession of events that occur without us being conscious of, or even noticing, them? We just suddenly take note, think, and say, “A coincidence.”
Until . . . .
A number of coincidences brought me together with that man on the first full moon of spring in the third millennium.
It was one of those Francophone parties that I know in advance will be boring. I try to cry off to the host; he doesn’t accept my apologies. (I will remain indebted to his insistence that I attend.)
I go unwillingly and with no intention of staying long.
One of those parties that he knows in advance will end with the police turning up. He tries to cry off to the host; he doesn’t accept his apologies. (Will he remain indebted to his friend’s insistence that he attends?)
He goes unwillingly and with no intention of staying long.
I’m wearing an eye-catching Bedouin dress.
I look around. I know some of those present. Fidgety, I jiggle my leg.
As soon as he enters the party he notices my dress and asks the host if I’m Kabyle.
“I’ll tell you later.”
I turn to three people speaking a foreign language: a mish-mash of a local dialect, Arabic, and French. I ask the nearest person what language they are speaking.
“I’ll tell you later.”
I turn my face in another direction.
My desire to leave the party increases, but I’m unable to.
I pour myself a drink and go to the balcony; I look down at the street whose bustle has stilled.
A person addresses me. I turn around. It’s the man I asked about his language.
A conversation begins that continues until the break of dawn.
I intend to sleep over at the host’s place, but others beat me to it and the place is too crowded. Ali suggests I sleep at his place.
I go with him to his house: an apartment with three bedrooms. I can choose whichever I like. I have no desire to sleep. He asks me if I’d like some more to drink, and I say yes.
We sit talking yet more hours.
I think that was the only time Ali spoke at such length.
About nine o’clock I make coffee for both of us. I have just told him that I am going to one of the oases near Cairo to attend a mulid. He is amicably insistent that he give me a lift to the nearest place. I invite him to come with me (out of courtesy). He hesitates. Then ventures a yes.
The mulid is on the other shore of the lake. With other groups, we take a sailboat across the lake, which ends in vast desert and the tomb of Sheikh Wali.
Both came from their own desert
laden with historic doubts
desolate lifeless desert
no spring, no oasis
we met
we were thirsting
at the breaking of dawn
I asked him to kiss me
he kissed me, kissed me, kissed
until I was quenched
since that kiss
I’ve never been sated.
Dates come one after another, almost daily. He phones me or I phone him after he finishes work and he invites me to dinner. I pass by his office downtown, then we go together to Pub 28 in Zamalek. We drink a few Stella beers, the brand we both prefer. We have dinner, quietly conversing: the news, stories, jokes, memories.
Something else is going on between us
something I’ve no