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The Man Who Lost His ShadowFathy Ghanem
As in Mahfouz’s famous “Cairo Trilogy”, Ghanem’s text conveys the impression that class is the overwhelming determinant of one’s fate in Egyptian society at the time of these novels’ setting (a little beyond the mid-twentieth century). One of the most intriguing characters in the novel is the woman whose life is evoked mostly in the first section of the book, although one is given some glimpses of her later life in the other three parts. She first encounters life in Cairo as a bewildered little peasant girl, “sold” into servitude (although her relative future prosperity is actually a source of envy to her mother) from a large village family. The prosperous household she enters, mainly in order to help look after the kindly but ailing matriarch of this family, becomes her entire world — until she leaves it, soon after her old mistress’s death, to be employed by the much poorer and elderly man who has been the tutor to the old lady’s pampered grandson. The old tutor is, of course, Yusif’s father, and because of his own romantic aspirations and his ambitious nature, Yusif is horrified when his father, a long-time widower, ends up marrying this servant from a peasant family, and he flees the home he has been sharing with his father. The woman described above is named Mabruka, and the fascinating thing about her is that she has such a powerful sense of her own self-worth that she never accepts her social inferiority as a fated and insurmountable drawback. She has, in other words, social aspirations that, had her employers been aware of them, they would have described as delusions of grandeur. For the master of the house is Rateb Bey — a hugely wealthy aristocrat. When Mabruka’s charms entice the young heir of the family fortune, Midhat, to try and seduce her, she sees in this “relationship” (from her perspective) a sort of parallel to the dreams of love and marriage harboured by Midhat’s same-age friend of a considerably lower class (Yusif, son of Midhat’s tutor) towards Midhat’s sister Suad, who returns this calf-love. Midhat’s entirely unromantic lust for Mabruka is never fulfilled, however, and Suad contracts an arranged marriage with a young man of her own class. Mabruka later comes close to marrying a young man less remote from her in social standing, but he is imprisoned for theft and she has a lucky escape. Since one learns of Mabruka’s sympathetic feelings for Yusif later in her own narrative, this fairly generous and soft-hearted teenage girl’s concern contrasts startlingly with what the reader has initially been told about the nature of her feelings for him as a mature woman: My only emotion now is hatred — hatred for the one man whose death I dream of — a slow lingering death with plenty of pain. I would like to knife open his belly, pull out his liver and grind it with my teeth. I would gouge out his eyes, or drink his blood. The man is Yusif Abdul Hamid, my husband’s son by his first wife. (9) Mabruka does not understand that Yusif’s initially furious, but later (after his father’s death) rather desultory way of blocking her out of his life and his refusal to assist her (his father’s widow) or her son (his half-brother) results not so much from mere selfish malice as from a refusal to be handicapped by the association with someone from her class — something that would be a major impediment to his own rapid rise in Cairo (and hence the wider Egyptian) society. Her own relatively slight upward mobility does not, in other words, inspire any fellow-feeling in him, having as he does rather larger aspirations, but instead it makes him fear any known association between himself and her as a contamination, or a humiliation. What Ghanem conveys all along, however, is the huge and finally destructive price paid by those who make the climb up the social ladder. Mabruka ends up as a notorious but somehow darkly glamorous prostitute, and Yusif as the enormously influential editor of the biggest Cairo daily (a man who mixes with Pashas and ministers), but, as “the man who lost his shadow”, he has unmistakably lost his soul. The loss of integrity may be something he seldom acknowledges even to himself, but his intrigues and betrayals, “necessary” to a man undertaking the social ascent from such relatively humble beginnings, eats away at his sense of self-worth and leaves him feeling simultaneously boastfully powerful and merely an empty cipher. Late in the novel Yusif tells himself: Our innocence dissolves, our selves flow corrupt. When I fell in love with Samia [a young film actress], I passed torturing nights. Did I love her or not? Was it merely lust I wanted to indulge? Should I confess my love to her, or conceal it? Why couldn’t I rush towards her with outstretched arms, embrace her and kiss her, tell her with a child’s ingenuousness, “I love you, I want you?” What is it that complicates life, turning innocence to folly, changing frankness into shyness or hypocrisy? What makes shame? (240) I think that Ghanem, despite his overt focus on four individuals’ lives and thoughts, is conveying an unmistakable analysis of Egyptian public life and its pitiless harshness and competitiveness as not only poisoning people’s emotional-moral lives, but also playing a role in the political humiliations suffered by the country. (The text takes us up to the period of the blockade of the Suez Canal.) As Yusif says near the end of the novel: If you, the people, could bear to confront the truth as it really is … [then] you would know with what mixed motives you are defending Egypt: principle confused with lack of scruple. All they have, he believes, is “honour confused with greed” — enlarging his own career to national proportions. “We live,” he says in a memorable phrase, “in a wretched splendour” (349). One of the novel’s worthiest characters is an artist (an illustrator at the newspaper that Yusif ends up controlling, a man who is initially a friend of his). This young man (named Showki) is a communist and, even though the author depicts his moments of cowardice and betrayal and exploitation (in other words, he is not unconvincingly idealized), he is probably the most principled person we encounter in the rather bleakly corrupt social context of the text. He, for instance, assists Mabruka when, widowed and almost destitute, she is rejected by Yusif. They are also lovers for a period — but Showki makes clear, even though he agonises in shame about this afterwards, that he expects Mabruka to abort the child she expects as a result of their liaison, and she complies. All the characters’ lives are endowed with some poignancy through the author’s device of giving us four narrated dramatic monologues. The second narrator in the text is the initially somewhat feather-headed Samia, the aspirant film actress who falls in love with the “mysterious” Yusif, who, although he does actually love her in return, is initially too selfishly inhibited and later too selfishly ambitious to marry her (they do live together for a period). He jilts her by flying off on a newspaper assignment on the day they are supposed to get married. She eventually forgives him and they are reunited, but their relationship peters out and Samia gets married to Yusif’s much older mentor, the newspaper’s initial editor Muhammad Nagi (who is the novel’s third narrator). Nagi’s life forms a clear parallel to and predecessor of Yusif’s own career and his ruthless conduct in personal relationships, and the pathos of Nagi’s last days and his ignominious death, seem to forewarn of the likely end Yusif, too, may face. For Yusif himself acknowledges, bleakly, that “truth in [him] is a form of deceit; a childishness that ages [him]; … [he has] a heart filled with love which fills itself on hate” (349). As a man who is ultimately a sort of simulacrum, he experiences “events” as they “crowd in”, but “they stop short of the heart, bounce off [his] skin” (349). Two quotations from the “Yusif” section of the novel may serve to conclude this brief discussion. They indicate the extent to which Yusif’s thoughts remain entangled with Mabruka, the (to himself) unacknowledgeable, shameful “twin” to himself: There is no right or wrong. There’s no point in going on. We have no idea where we’re going. A little servant, neat, wearing slippers, Mabruka ... Mabruka at the beck of others. Standing behind Suad, standing between my father and me to fetch the ping-pong balls. Then she grows up and marries my father. If this can happen, then anything is possible. Why shouldn’t the servant now pouring my coffee become a boss himself in a few years, or days? (265) Like the above, the final quotation also makes clear both Yusif’s despair and its complex, shameful causes, since it is he much more than Mabruka who has prostituted all that was best in him: And now, tonight: Mabruka lies on a bed, she tells some man that she’s my relation. Her body is stark naked. The body my father embraced, married, died because of. The body that bore Ibrahim, my brother. Nothing covers it. Her voice whispers the scandal. “Yusif al-Suefi? So you know him. He’s famous, isn’t he? I married his father … he’s the brother of my boy. If you don’t believe what I say — ask him.” |
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One of the older generation of African novelists is the Egyptian Fathy Ghanem, whose The Man Who Lost His Shadow (written in Arabic, with the English translation by Desmond Stewart published simultaneously in the USA and the UK in 1966) is the subject of this entry. Ghanem’s is perhaps a more gritty and episodic, less epic style than that of his great compatriot Naguib Mahfouz (a Nobel Prize winner for literature), but he is a distinctly first-rate novelist. The Man Who Lost His Shadow is sub-titled “A Novel in Four Books”, and although it soon becomes clear that the person referred to in the title (and the main focus of the narrative) is the relatively young Yusif Hamid, it is only in the final of the four sections that we are given his own views in his own voice, since the earlier three sections depict, in turn, the woman of Hamid’s age who married his elderly father; the woman he loved and lived with for a time; and the powerful newspaper editor who initially employed him and whom he ends up humiliating and replacing.