I didn’t write last Wednesday’s article for I felt
reluctant to write about Muhammed Salmawi’s memoir titled “A day or couple of
days…” published by Al-Karma publishing house in 2017. I was honored to receive
his invitation to attend the book signing where the spacious place became
crowded with the big audience of Egypt’s elite bunch of politicians and
intellectuals.
There is no secret behind this reluctance except for
the abundant feelings, information and memories I share with what Mr. Salmawi
wrote and which I lived during my lifetime as I belong to the same age group of
the writer for he was born in 1945 while I was born in 1946. I said the same
age group and not the same generation lest I fall in the trap that my late
great friend and mentor Kamel Zoheiri used to mock as he detested that silly
talk about “conflict of generations”, “experiences of generations” and “idiosyncrasy
of a generation”. He used to say “We now have generations’ investment like we
once had capital investment.”
Throughout my old friendship with the memoir’s writer,
I had other common things to share with him regarding geography, history, thought,
politics and also finance! For “financially” I still owe Mr. Salmawi a 150
Egyptian pounds that I borrowed from him in 1978 to collect the money needed for
the first installment of a small apartment in Ahmed Esmat Street as I had no home
to accommodate my little family at that time. Whenever we meet, I apologize for
not paying, adding that the sum reached thousands of pounds now as a gram of 18
karat gold in 1978 was worthy of ten Egyptian pounds; however, it now reached about
550 pounds, meaning the 150 pounds in 1978 became more than 8 thousand pounds
now, not to mention that I and many others are indebted to the man and his great
wife, artist Nazli Madkour, for the fancy meals she used to send us in the
appeal prison. The kind lady used to supply us with food enough for thirteen
hungry men and not only one. Along with the meals, I saw for the first time in
my life– I was then 31 years old –plastic spoons, forks and knives since
cutlery were not allowed into prisons.
As to the common geographical aspect we share, it’s
the connection to the city of Dessouq and the neighboring villages where
Salmawi’s family came from Mahallat Malek situated 5 kilometers north to
Dessouq while I was born and living in Ganag situated about 20 kilometers south
to Dessouq.
Then we come to the common intellectual, political and
historical aspects as both of us belong to the same political ideology;
nationalism that has an Arab-national root and a socialist essence. We also had
common political struggles that led us once to get jailed, another time to get
fired from our jobs and also to be mocked and ridiculed by the rulers and their
filthy servants.
For all this I mentioned in that long introduction,
how could one like me be objective and unbiased in discussing or reading the memoir
of that old time partner?
This time I will not write about the book itself. Otherwise,
I will talk about what I think is inseparable of Salmawi’s memoir although it
was not mentioned in it, that is how could people from different social backgrounds
with different standard of livings and who had dissimilar upbringings,
compositions and cultures have a common intellectual and political belief?
It’s a recurring case in our contemporary life, for
example, sons of the rich well-off families of the high class holding civil
ranks of Pasha and Bek united with sons of the middle class families, and both
of them; sons of high and middle classes, united with the struggling poor in the
Egyptian communist movement, as examples like Muhammed Sayed Ahmed, Saif
an-Nasr, Sabri Abdalla, Khaled Mohie ed-Din in addition to so many names of
those descending from families of high and middle classes were members of
political groups that included craftsmen, laborers and striving peasants and wage
earners.
Also, how could those having an almost complete
intellectual and cultural composition and equipped with historical awareness
and disciplined understanding enabling them to seriously interpret phenomena
and protecting them from getting deceived accept to continue and actually
defend an era or economic socio-political experiment that was hit in the heart?
Not only did they continue believing in and defending this experiment, they
also paid the price for that by getting jailed, losing their source of income
and denying them their basic rights in life. Moreover, they were ready to
abandon their high class and sacrifice no matter the price was in a system that
promises nothing, whereas the system of sectarian and religious loyalties and ideologies
promises eternal paradise, herds of gorgeous women and seas of honey and wine.
Going up in the social classes from poor to middle
then to high class became common. We also knew – actually we know every moment –
those whose grandfathers benefited from the plan to fight bare-footedness and
whom rough reeds of Hasir rugs along with its biting insects used to leave
their marks on their wasted bodies, and suddenly – through corrupt and
malicious means – they became wealthy. On the other side, choosing by your own
will to replace luxury life with the luxury of belonging to and fighting for
the poor and deprived is really the paradox that does not happen a lot in the
society.
Those were some questions I wanted to ask before
trying to give my opinion about the memoir of the big writer Muhammed Salmawi
which I wish to be objective.
Translated into English by: Dalia Elnaggar
This article was published in
Almasry alyoum newspaper on December 20, 2017.
To see the original article,
go to:
#almasry_alyoum
#ahmed_elgammal #Muhammed_Salmawi_memoir #Egypt
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