Red Wine

Amina Zaydan, Sally Gomaa

Description

Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature
Suzie Mohamad Galal, born in the Egyptian city of Suez during the War of Attrition in the late 1960s, is a woman of inner conflicts, at once a fighter and a lover, who traverses the boundaries of ethnicity and religion. Her whole life is intricately tied to the wars and political events taking place in Egypt. But as she grapples with where to begin her story of personal and national crises, questions of narration arise: which metaphor best serves the layers of meaning she wants to communicate, and whose voice is telling the story anyway?
Red Wine is both timely in its attention to the issues of state brutality, religious extremism, and gender, and timeless in the way it deals with the themes of coming of age, guilt, and sadness.

Sujets

• Historical
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617971815
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in 2010 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 © 2007 by Amina Zaydan
First published in Arabic in 2007 as Nabidh ahmar
Protected under the Berne Convention
English translation copyright © 2010 by Sally Gomaa
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. 2265/10
eISBN: 978 161 797 181 5
Dar el Kutub Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zaydan, Amina
Red Wine / Amina Zaydan; translated by Sally Gomaa.—Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2010
p. cm.
eISBN: 978 161 797 181 5
1. Arabic fiction I. Sally Gomaa (trans.) II. Title
892.73
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 14 13 12 11 10
Designed by Andrea El-Akshar
Printed in Egypt
Great deeds do not take a long time.
To my daughters, Hamees and Farah Abd el-Azeem, and Suha, who I did not give birth to. I love you.
Overture: Forty Years of Slowness
T his time was different from all the others. I did not run away or hide behind my mother’s mirror or submit to my uncle’s will as I did every other time, going along with what my father would always advise, “Be like the palm trees, above grudges, yielding their best fruits when stones are thrown at them.”
No, not again. If palm trees were handled gently, they would yield their best fruits: dark, sweet dates would fall off ripened by the pure air of great heights.
This time I did something so different and so right that it helped me overcome the aftermath of my relationship with Essam, except for the nightmares I pull myself out of with terrifying slowness, choking and gasping and fearing death for long moments, until I wake up and realize that I’m now quite far from those ages haunted by my uncle’s ghost or Essam’s ghost or Andrea’s ghost.
This time my resolve to make a new beginning is unshaken. It comes after suffering punishments for a total of almost twenty years, years that divided my brief childhood from my current age, a few months over forty, and being disturbed by nightmares every time I fall asleep: my blind grandmother comes for a visit. She is beating my body in circular motions with her walking stick. She keeps dipping it in bright red mud and I keep trying to stay clean, which is like trying to swim without getting wet.
My father is running with an amputated leg dangling in his trousers, looking for a new country on which to dump his patriotism. I’m trying to catch up with him to reattach his leg to his thigh. He keeps rushing forward and I keep stumbling like I’m carrying a heavy load. In the meantime Asaad is watching, arms crossed, sneering at my inability to catch up with my father. . . . Or with anything else. I look back surprised by his regular appearance in nightmares about my father. All my life, like a fool, I keep looking back.
My brother Selim is a toddler crawling. He stops to play in the excrement he has uncontrollably dumped. He puts it in his mouth to taste it. This gives him chronic intestinal diseases with regular outbreaks that keep him skinny and delirious. Older now, and dreading another fit of diarrhea, he decides to stay at home. If he ever leaves, he rushes back, going straight into his room where he always shuts himself up. We only see him on his way to the bathroom. I shudder, pretending to be disgusted and bored, which is my way to avoid seeing him or helping him.
My mother, whose attention I’m trying to draw by pulling on her dress, is nothing but an image reflected in every mirror—an image with no tangible presence.
Then there is my uncle who is ‘playing God’—inflicting suffering and expecting people to love him and fear him. I actually love him, not like a strong support, but like a contradictory idea that speaks only when he is lost in the narrow alley of himself under the influence of drugs. Then he seems real and I don’t want to be afraid of him. He says, “All I hoped for was liberty, equality, fraternity like the French or the Bolshevik Revolution or just for the sake of humanity.”
Finally, there is Andrea, watching with a neutral smile. He used to love cinematic improvisation and ruled over every detail of every scene with his eyes and his smile. I would closely watch his face trying to figure out how good I was at playing the part he had given me, which I don’t think I ever got to play.
Until I reached this point: slightly over the Big Four Zero and still hearing drums playing in my head, lifting me up, then plunging me down, becoming louder and louder until they match the sound effects of a parody in which I play all the parts. I try to escape its snares to forge a new, peaceful beginning inspired by the part I know I have to play regardless of what others want. So I write on the mirror with red ink:
“Remember to say no, no, no.” With no equivocation. And in yellow ink:
“Be careful.”
“Fear nothing.”
And on the last line: “Justice and mercy. ‘The male is not as the female.’ Those are your verses.”
To all respectable people: do not misjudge if you happen to see a woman taking off her clothes and stretching out her body under the moonlight; she is most probably over forty, forlorn, and calling on the moon to help her figure out who she is.
The difference between what is true and what is made public is so vast that it verges on alienation. God, what would stop the agony of being lost in the desert of my soul where tyranny roves like a horse on fire, tipping the balance of the universe, setting off the destruction upon whose ruins I quietly dance until I fall asleep?
I rush back to the middle of everything. I choke on the smell of coffee and gas leaking from the stove and the way being forty feels as I stand in front of the mirror not knowing who I am; I stare harder and turn my face toward the right then toward the left. I smooth over the wrinkles around my eyes and my lips until boredom and a fly buzzing near my face force me to move. I want to weep and to feel that the whole world is conspiring against me in the name of love or friendship or marriage or solidarity or even coincidence. Since they keep intruding upon my daily exercise in saying “no,” I finally decide to take my mother’s advice: “Do not lean on a wall for support; a sudden raid may knock it down.”
This is how I was when Essam set me free, or perhaps right at the moment when he announced our divorce three times in the presence of my uncle and other witnesses. He did so not only without reluctance, but with such resolve and relief that my uncle did not have to pressure him to sign the divorce papers. Naturally, I got what I thought was fair. Our history together left no room for hesitation and our rejection of each other was certain. Strangely, I still felt crucified, floating over a gulf of grievance without knowing the extent of my punishments, which were ripping my soul apart. I wrapped my head in a black veil and I grew a hundred years older every day. I was never tired of digging a grave I filled with inertia and lethargy laced with bitterness and filled with memories.
After a hot shower, I make another resolution to leave. Running away is not reactive: it is erasing a chapter from decades of nonexistence in my pseudo-lives that are now passing by as if projected on a black glutinous screen. There was nothing I could do except wait for a lucid moment to reveal a gap in this siege. For some time, all I had was light sleep interrupted by gasping and soundless screams.
Now, I must go out, face everybody, and search for myself in the old haunts, starting with Khairiya’s shed, which her landlord demolished to build a huge apartment building with long balconies so that his sons could occupy the upper floors while he presided over the first one. I should also stop by the university, home of the political party, and all my friends, including Asaad and Rebecca and others, in a constant search for a family tree to which I could belong.
If water can bear ships, life can bear with me.
Like a strong woman, I go back to my father’s house so that he can hold my hand and cry over my mother’s death. She threw herself off the balcony that faced the narrow alley and fell to her death on the concrete that government workers had previously poured over small French tiles. How I missed the way they glistened and the sound of the raindrops rolling over them. What my dad and I believed was different from what my brother, my uncle, and the rest of the mourners thought. They believed she fell while hanging out heavy wet clothes over clotheslines worn out by the sun and the humidity of the summer. This tragic scenario was not totally removed from the truth because my mother was actually hanging out clothes and she might have decided at some point that nothing worked and nothing removed dirt. She used to scrub clothes in large amounts of detergent with her bare hands time after time without reaching the level of cleanliness she sought. Even after the clothes dried, she insisted that dust from outside made them even dirtier than they were before, so she would wash them again, which is what Dr. Shawki called being obsessive-compulsive. But his pills did not work because she would secretly spit them out after my brother forced them under her tongue.
I was easily able to visualize my mother pushing herself over the high fence of the balcony and see her body smashed in the blood that trickled from her ears all the way to the main doorway. I could smell the odors and hear the noises that surrounded her right at the momen