Review: Yasmine El Rashidi on Sonallah Ibrahim & Ahmed Naji

Two Egyptian writers’ spin on the Arabic tradition of the literary diary

The literary diary is a genre popular in Arabic writing. Known as mudhakkirāt, which translates literally as “memorandums,” revealing the form’s perceived proximity to lived reality, such testimonies came to be anticipated of celebrated and public, including writers like Taha Hussein and the Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz and also political dignitaries of comparable stature—the “Free Officers” of Egypt’s 1952 revolution, former president Anwar el-Sadat, and Hassanein Heikal, speechwriter to the late president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Although their diaries wouldn’t usually be classified as “literary,” in modern-day Arabic publishing all mudhakkirāt are bundled under “Arabic literature.”

Few novelists have persistently inverted that genre into fiction (with all it encompasses of literary memoir, daily journal, notes), and certainly no one to the extent and with the accomplishment of the now eighty-seven-year-old Sonallah Ibrahim, who is best known for the spare, Hemingway-like prose he took on in the 1960s. Ibrahim self-published his first novel, That Smell, in 1966, after being released from a five-year stay in Nasser’s prisons for his involvement in the Communist Party. Essentially autobiographical, That Smell took on a quotidian, diaristic form, narrating the malaise of a just-released prisoner as he tries to readapt to daily life. Prison was formative in shaping Ibrahim as a writer: “Write, set down what you see and hear,” he wrote in his journal after borrowing and reading Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa from the prison library. Everyday actions—buying meat, lighting a cigarette, making tea, getting off a chair—had equal place to momentous events in That Smell’s pages.