A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature by David Tresilian Page A

some of the best written in Arabic, including ‘All on a Summer’s Night’, ‘The Dregs of the City’ and ‘The Shame’, filmed as
The Sin
in 1965 with Egyptian actress Faten Hamama in the lead role. Later pieces that have been widely noticed include the longer stories ‘The Stranger’ and ‘The Black Policeman’. 15 The former story is a study of the psychology of killing, the latter of the effects of torture, not on the tortured but on those doing the torturing.
    ‘All on a Summer’s Night’ is set in the Egyptian countryside and is the story of a group of boys, farm labourers, who meet by the irrigation canals on summer nights to dream of a better life, or at least of a life not so dominated by toil and sexual and other forms of frustration. ‘A handful of boys … their muddy faces full of cracks, their clothes in rags, their faces an indefinite blur of tanned hide’, they dream of going to the nearby town of Mansoura. This dream,however, is no sooner realized than it ends in an outbreak of violence and in the frustrated realization that ‘we were wretchedly poor, and that there was nothing in our homes but barking dogs and roaring fathers and screeching mothers and the suffocating smoke of the stove.’ ‘The Shame’ also ends in frustration and defeat. The story of Fatma, a young girl wrongly suspected of breaking the strict honour code that governs sexual behaviour in her village, it shows Fatma being eventually vindicated, though not before horrific violence is done to her.

    9. Still from the film of
The Sin
by Yusif Idris, made in 1965 with Egyptian actress Faten Hamama in the lead role
    Idris’s description of such modest lives is repeated in ‘The Dregs of the City’, in which a prim young judge, carried away by the obsequiousness he thinks of as his due, seduces a female servant from a poor area of the city. This he does mainly out of idleness, but also out of a desire to assert his power over her, the story pointing to connections between class difference and sexual exploitation. Atthe end of the story, the judge seeks out his servant among the ‘dregs of the city’, suspecting her of having stolen his watch. For a moment he feels ashamed at the performance he is putting on before this miserable woman: standing in the squalor of her home, demanding the return of a cheap watch, he catches a glimpse of the ridiculous figure he cuts. He feels much better when driving back into the better parts of the city, once the ‘orderly streets come into view’, where the ‘people are clean-shaven and well dressed and their features are fine.’
    Idris saw his writing as a mode of intervention in contemporary life, which is why, later in his career, he insisted that he could not engage in literary writing with the streets of Cairo flooded with sewage water, public services having broken down as a result of years of mismanagement, and with ‘economic anarchy … rampant’. Instead, he stepped up his activities as a journalist, contributing a regular column to the newspaper
al-Gumhuriyya
throughout the 1960s and to
al-Ahram
from the 1970s onwards. Moreover, Idris wanted to produce a ‘truly Egyptian’ national literature that should serve as a series of ‘revolutionary blasts’ against present conditions. He disliked both the ‘pale imitation of European literature fashionable in the late forties’, consisting of what he saw as the ‘aestheticism and the elitist conception of literature still fostered by “grand old men” like Taha Hussein’ and the result of the earlier generation’s desire to construct modern Arabic literature on the European model. He commented bitterly on what he saw as the ‘drudgery’ of Mahfouz’s
Cairo Trilogy
, for him a sort of vast pastiche of European realism.
    However, Idris also disliked the experiments with the Arab ‘heritage’, in other words with pre-modern literary materials, that other writers were turning to in a desire to produce a literature less