Ahdaf Soueif highlights changing cultural climate in Egypt

By Andrea Perkins

A CAPTIVATING read on many levels, Ahdaf Soueif’s novel The Map of Love (Anchor; $14 paper) is perhaps most valuable for its exposure of that permeable membrane between characters’ actions and the politics that surround them.

Using her character’s private lives to highlight the changing cultural climate in Egypt over a 100-year period, Soueif splices journal entries and letters with deeply researched historical events. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if the book’s politics are the backdrop to its personal stories or vice versa.

“The personal is the political,” Amal, one of the book’s two heroines, says at one point.

Soueif deftly reveals the inner workings of Egyptian high society from the beginning to the end of the 20th century, shattering Western misconceptions of Islamic culture, which still abound today. (When I told my grandmother I was moving to Egypt to work for a magazine, she was convinced that the minute I stepped off the plane I’d be taken hostage by terrorists and thrown into a harem full of scantily clad women.)

Having grown up both in England and in Egypt, Soueif maintains an ideal balance between East and West, displaying a deep understanding of both without pretending to be neutral or dispassionate about the plight of Egypt. She toys with (and eventually transcends) familiar literary genres like the “19th-century romance” and “the memoir of an Englishwoman traveling abroad.”

There is no precedent for this kind of book. Not only is it rare for an Arab writer to write in English, but it is rarer still for an Arab woman to write at all, especially about sex and politics.

The book starts in midsentence, as if the reader has casually stepped into the stream of time. It is 1997, and Isabel Parkman, a New York journalist, is struggling with her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. While her mother, Jasmine, is losing her grasp on the past, Isabel’s obsession with her own history is triggered when she finds an old trunk in Jasmine’s house. The trunk belonged to Isabel’s great-grandmother, an Englishwoman named Anna Winterbourne. Though the journals and papers inside the trunk are written in Arabic, French, and English, Isabel pieces together what her mother has kept hidden: their Middle Eastern ancestry.

Isabel meets Omar al-Ghamrawi, a famous conductor and frustrated Arab nationalist. Enamored, she tells him about her assignment to go to his homeland to interview the Egyptians about the millennium. She also tells him about the trunk. He suggests she take it with her to Cairo, where his sister, Amal, might help her translate the Arabic journals. And it is through Amal that we arrive at Anna Winterbourne’s saga. Amal has just returned to Cairo after a dysfunctional marriage in England. She dives into the trunk’s story and learns that she and her brother are in fact Isabel’s cousins.

ANNA’S JOURNALS start at the beginning of the 20th century. After the death of her first husband, she travels to Egypt, hoping to find the light-filled world of John Frederick Lewis’ Orientalist paintings. Once there, however, she realizes that because she is English, the “real Egypt” is beyond her reach.

She soon finds that the restrictions placed on Arab women are not so different from those placed on women back home. Some aspects of Egyptian life actually afford her more liberty than she has known before. Conventions like the veil and mashribiyya screen (behind which women once sat and listened to the men’s conversations) provide her with the unusual power of invisibility. Subtly, Soueif suggests that “the veil” may be no more a vehicle of oppression than the caked-on makeup some women wear.

Soueif (with her doctorate in linguistics) makes language a major theme in The Map of Love, dwelling over its layers of embedded meaning. She also shows how language can be a used as tool of colonization and, at times, an obstacle to communication rather than the means of it.

Soueif’s careful chronicling of the turmoil that surrounds Anna, Amal, and Isabel becomes a “map” to the current situation in the Middle East, offering an angle not generally found in mainstream media representations of the region.

From the December 28, 2000-January 3, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Fresh perspective on our love affair with firearms

By Patrick Sullivan

IF THE GUN FANS have a Doomsday Clock, it must have been set at one minute to midnight in the months following the bloody massacre at Columbine High School. Gun-control laws started spraying out of state legislatures faster than armor-piercing bullets from a modified AR-15. Even the National Rifle Association’s main man, eagle-faced actor and NRA president Charlton Heston, was starting to resemble that hurt hawk from the Robinson Jeffers poem: “The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes/ The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those/ That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.”

Some people were starting to think–with either fear or hope–that guns were on their way out of American life. They really should have known better.

The most obvious sign that the way of the gun is far from dead is the victory of George W. Bush, who won a fiercely contested election in which the NRA spent millions on his behalf. But there are other omens: after a significant decline, the NRA’s membership is growing again. And there is something else, something harder to quantify: the horror of Columbine seems to be fading. The gun is back.

What makes gun culture so resilient? Historian Michael A. Bellesiles may have some answers. In Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (Knopf; $30), Bellesiles goes looking for the roots of our country’s unusually passionate relationship with firearms. What he finds is so startling as to be revolutionary. Popular fancy locates the birth of our national obsession with guns in the rugged nature of early American life. Our movies and popular fiction present life in 18th- and early-19th-century America as a constant struggle of the firearm-toting frontiersmen against British soldiers, aggressive Indians, and dangerous wild animals.

But in Arming America, Bellesiles argues that guns were actually fairly rare in early America. Drawing on a mountain of probate, military, and business records, as well as travel accounts and personal letters, he makes the case that gun ownership was once the exception: “America’s gun culture is an invented tradition,” he writes. “The notion that a well-armed public buttressed the American dream would have appeared harebrained to most Americans before the Civil War.”

There’s an amusingly iconoclastic aspect to this. Our notion of the effectiveness of America’s citizen soldiers during the Revolutionary War rests on such engagements as the Battle of Bunker Hill. More often, though, poorly trained and armed militiamen (perhaps quite sensibly) turned and ran at the first sight of the enemy. Most Americans showed up for military service unarmed, and what firearms they were given usually came from Europe because domestic production of firearms remained almost nonexistent.

Many volunteers were completely unfamiliar with guns, and they were often terrible shots, even accounting for the notorious inaccuracy of their muzzle-loaded weapons: “One group of Americans hiding near the road fired a volley at Major Pitcairn from ten yards,” Bellesiles writes of an attempt to ambush a British officers. “All missed. They did, however, frighten Pitcairn’s horse, which ran off, leaving the rider unhurt, though shaken, on the ground.”

The general ignorance of–and even hostility toward–guns continued throughout the early life of the young republic. It took the social transformations wrought by the Civil War to change those attitudes: “The Civil War transformed the gun from a tool into a perceived necessity,” Bellesiles writes. “The war had introduced the majority of American males to the use of firearms; peace brought those weapons into their homes.”

Bellesiles lays the responsibility for the creation of our powerful gun culture on two other forces: a military-minded government eager to arm its people; and gun manufacturers like Samuel Colt eager to make money.

The real significance of Arming America, though, lies less in any assignment of blame than in its offer of the possibility of an alternative. Contrary to popular belief, America has not always bristled with guns; they are not an inextricable part of our national character. That fact removes a suffocating inevitability from the debate over gun control.

We may choose to regulate guns more strictly, or we may not. But history hasn’t made the decision for us.

From the December 21-27, 2000 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.