Sonallah Ibrahim, the Egyptian novelist "who chronicled with deadpan irony his country's submission to dictatorship and materialism in an influential career spanning nearly six decades," died August 13, the New York Times reported. He was 88. Egyptian culture minister Minister Ahmed Fouad Hanno said Ibrahim left behind "an immortal literary and humanitarian legacy," and described the author as a "pillar of modern Arabic literature."
Ibrahim "shocked the Arab literary world with his short, singeing debut novel," That Smell (1966), and while many other books followed, "the tone was set by the first--it was censored, banned, circulated underground and not definitively published in complete, open form until 20 years later," the Times noted, adding that the novel's "stripped-down style" and its "harsh depiction of a present without perspective were at odds with the ornate main currents of Arabic literature, as well as the self-confidence of the official Egyptian narrative."
That Smell's focus is on a young man who has just been released from prison. Ibrahim had spent five years in the harsh jails after dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser rounded up the country's Communists on New Year's Day 1959. He developed his narrative style while incarcerated in the Al-Wahat prison in the western desert, where books by Ernest Hemingway, among others, were available. His appreciation for Hemingway "was an anomaly given his resolute lifelong critique of America," the Times observed. "It wasn't the underlying political message, not on the surface at least, that led to the book's rejection by official and unofficial censors; it was its unadorned treatment of forbidden topics like masturbation, impotence and homosexuality."
"It pierced Arabic literature in a way that nothing else has done," said Margaret Litvin, an associate professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University.
AFP (via France24) reported that, arguably, Ibrahim's most famous novel was Zaat (1992), which told "the story of Egypt's modern history--from the overthrow of the monarchy in 1952 to the neoliberalism of the 1990s under president Hosni Mubarak--through the eyes of an ordinary, middle-class woman." The book was adapted into a prime-time TV series in 2013, "bringing Ibrahim's scathing portrayal of power to a new generation of Egyptians in the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprising that ousted Mubarak."
Among Ibrahim's most celebrated works are The Committee (1981), a Kafkaesque allegory of bureaucracy and surveillance, and Stealth (2007), a semi-autobiographical account of his childhood during World War II.
He taught Arabic literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1999, "which reinforced his doubts about America and its role in the world, as reflected in his 2005 novel, Amrikanly," the Times wrote.
"Real literature gives expression to people's lives and the natural aspirations of an individual people," he said in a 2011 interview with Elliott Colla, a Georgetown University scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies.
"Sonallah understood that the expression of truth--even simple, direct truth--is never a simple, direct matter," Colla said. "His career as a writer was thus dedicated to the pursuit of languages and literary forms that would best allow him to speak truth."