Laurent DOUCET
Professor David L. PARRIS
Irene FENOGLIO
translated by Pierre Petiot
Published in french in the issue number 5 of the French magazine
A littérature-action
Published in English in the second issue of the Room surrealist Magazine
ALBERT COSSERY
A PARADOXICAL ETHIC OF INSURRECTION
Laurent[1]DOUCET
A writer’s name has long circulated under the mantle despite the tributes (from Henry Miller who discovered it, to Jean-Luc Godard in Cannes recently, through Albert Camus, Georges Moustaki who dedicated a song to him, Michel Piccoli etc.), literary prizes (Grand Prix de la Francophonie for all his work, prestigious prizes of the Society of People of Letters, Mediterranean Prize, for the most important), and the honors of the international press (from the Times Literary Supplement of London to the influential New York Review of Books), and media. But since the large-scale bloodthirsty upheavals that have occurred in recent years in the territories of the former empires of the Middle and Near East, and thanks to the passion for his work and his philosophy of the life of an editor like Joelle Losfeld and a few readers who are well versed in the loving and subversive transmission of books and images, the jubilant and almost prophetic character of his writings overflows with the discreet fraternity of the early days, and spreads voluptuously through these times of sadness, like the arabesques of tea that infuses in a cup or the volutes of smoke. Born in Cairo to a Syrian Orthodox family, he became an atheist and a writer at a very young age in contact with literature, which he discovered at the Lycée Français. Often compared to our great Enlightenment writer for his sharp look and joyful irony, this Franco-Egyptian Voltaire passed away ten years ago — who died in 2008 in his room at the Hotel La Louisiana in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where he stayed for 60 years.This author is Albert Cossery. To the filmmaker Michel Mitrani, who asked him about a documentary about his literary vocation, he replied: “From the age of ten I knew that I would become a writer… “an age when he had already read most of our classics! In his books, you can find a whole Balzacian Comedy, transcribing into miniatures of the Thousand and One Nights for today, savoring the irony of the Enlightenment in the shadow of the Pyramids, meeting Pangloss who has become lazy and mystical in “the ecstasy of the simple pleasure of being alive”, and even imagine Yves Simon fleeing Saint-Germain-des-Près for Egypt on a donkey in the footsteps of the Serenip brothers! A reader of the great treatises of Eastern wisdom, his eight books can also be read as a cycle, an initiation into subversive gaze and inner peace, whose titles “resonate” as an anarchist version of the Buddhist stages of the Eightfold Path: The Forgotten Men of God, The House of Certain Death, The Lazy in the Fertile Valley,Beggars and Pride, Violence and Derision, A Conspiracy of Saltimbanques, An Ambition in theUne ambition dans le désert Desert. Friend also with Lawrence Durrell, the most Pascalian of all our writers (who only left his hotel room late in the
day and seemed to taste sleep more than many of his characters) is “barely” beginning to enter the school bag. There is no doubt that this dossier concocted by the magazine A Literature-Action reveals new ways to “make your revolution on its own” and “learn to laugh to the people”, in order to undermine with elegance and manslaughter the hypocrisy and “idiocy” of humanity, such as the arrogance of the powerful.
[1]* Writer, teacher, president of “La Rose impossible, Maison André Breton,” co-director of the magazine A literature-action.
Albert COSSERY, génie hors classe
Professor David L.[1]PARRIS
Albert Cossery is relatively little known, despite the quality of his eight books. What for? Because it is difficult to categorize and we are used to situating our readings in an agreed cultural context; so-called encyclopedic dictionaries are limited to giving the place of birth and death of an author, and to quote one or two significant titles.
Cossery would then be an “Egyptian French-speaking author.” Egyptian French-language literature is more abundant than one might imagine; the establishment of French culture in Egypt dates back to Napoleon, and the British colonial regime did not put an end to The French cultural hegemony, embodied by elite schools.
Albert Cossery is a French-sounding name; it derives, however, from the small Syrian town of Qousseir, near the Lebanese border, from which the ancestors of Cossery, who, in accordance with Arab usage, are said to have been named after their hometown, Qousseiri, which may have been francised by Albert in Cossery. His first name, Albert, indicates a certain intention in his parents, and predestines him to become Europeanized.
If he does not integrate easily with French culture, or with the idea that we are making of it, he is a marginal in Egypt, because his parents, though Arab by culture, are orthodox by religion, belonging to a minority within the Christian minority of the country.
His language, that of his novels, I would say, simplifying a little, but not too much, is a mixture of classical French and popular Arabic. Thus, he always uses the “tu” form in the singular, using the vow exclusively for the plural, in accordance with the use of Arabic. His prose is not enamelled with Arabic words, even if from time to time a character swears “by Allah” or uses a politeness phrase like “my bey”. More often than not, however, Cossery translates into French the phrases he deems indispensable, such as “salvation over you.” One wonders why Cossery did not choose to write in Arabic, since it would have been “more natural”, but in fact no writer writes in Arabic in a natural and spontaneous way (Georges Hénein, another polyglot Egyptian author, would have learned Arabic only as an adult); the grammar of literary Arabic is conventional, quite distant from spoken usage, and is painfully acquired in school. For Muslims, classical Arabic is understood at the mosque, otherwise its rules must be mastered after a long apprenticeship. Cossery did not attend the mosque and his Jesuit
school was probably particularly keen to teach him the basics of French, so his choice to speak French is probably not as strange as one might think. At the end of the day, you could say that the colonial system has determined its linguistic identity.
On the other hand, if Cossery is close, in many cases, to Egyptian authors as we know them, such as Naguib Mahfouz or Ala’a al-Aswany, he does not enjoy the reputation he deserves in his country of origin, which condemns him to a double marginality, both in France and Egypt.
Cossery, who disappeared in 2008, aged 94, left us eight books. Given its great age, this production, if it is fairly regular, represents a publication every eight years on average during his adult life, which is honourable, certainly, but not extensive.
One is tempted to say that this production is divided into a collection of tales and seven novels. On the one hand, however, it should be said that The Forgotten Men of God (a collection of tales published in Cairo in 1941) already contain in its embryonic state the major themes that Cossery would continue to develop throughout his career, and that Cossery’s seven novels are all composed of chapters, each of which is practically a tale that could almost be read separately.
Although Cossery’s novels are few, the material he has seems unlimited, and it is often said, when he reads it, that his story is so rich in incidents that he could have made several novels of it. Thus, in a certain sense, the pleasure of this reading is not to discover the end word of the enigma at the denouement, but to revel in the universe that Cossery (re)builds for us.
It is difficult to recognize the Cosserian values more in one character than another, but already in Cossery’s first collection of tales, The Forgotten Men of God, in “The Factor Takes Revenge”, Radwan Aly, an episodic character, the poorest man in the world, has for all that good only a terracotta chamber pot; disturbed by the noise in the street outside, he throws his chamber pot at the head of the merchant who makes too much noise: “to save the morning sleep of the whole street” (HOD 213). Self-sacrifice and misery, themes found in Cossery’s most famous novel, Beggars and Pride; Gohar is a former university professor who has given up teaching to live in a room where he sleeps on piles of newspapers, and where he owns a single chair for any piece of furniture; to a police inspector investigating the murder of a young prostitute, who is surprised to find a cultured man living in poverty, Gohar replies that this is the life he chose: “There is no mystery here. I live as a beggar because I want to” (MO 194).
This destitution is linked to the idea of “peace”: we only really have peace when, like the truncated man who is Gohar’s neighbour, we have nothing to lose.
Gohar chose the life of a beggar after giving up his teaching career: “For more than twenty years, he had taught criminal nonsense, subjected young brains to the yoke of a false and smoking philosophy. How could he take himself seriously? (MO 131).”
There, of course, I feel challenged, since it is pretty much my career as an academic that he describes, and that of many of his European readers, I imagine. More than once, we will have the opportunity to see that the ostensibly Egyptian reality of Cossery’s novels contains messages for the Western world to which, using French and having it published in France, it addresses itself.
Is Gohar somehow Cossery’s representative? Well, the reality is not so simple. Of course, Cossery is the creator of all these characters, but obviously Gohar inspires a particular sympathy.
First, as far as I know, Cossery never went to graduate school, much less was he a teacher. Moreover, one wonders, by reading Beggars and Proud, what is the faculty where Gohar professed; literature, history, geography? We don’t know.
And then, Cossery did not sleep on piles of newspapers with a single chair for any furniture; he lived as a boarder at the Louisiana Hotel from his arrival in France in the aftermath of the war until his death, and he insisted on owning nothing, but he did not live as a beggar.
It seems, moreover, that Cossery’s father was a small landowner who lived, along with the rest of his family, from the work of his “sharecroppings.” Many of the Cosserian characters are in exactly the same situation. In The Lazy of the Fertile Valley, Serag has the idea, shocking for her family, to look for work. In The Violence and Derision, Heykal, one of the main characters, a dandy with only one beautiful costume, which he has maintained by Siri, a servant whom he pays from time to time, lives on income that he inherited.
If Cossery, like his characters, takes a critical look at society, this disillusioned gaze is not accompanied by any reformist intent, much less a revolutionary project; Heykal: “I don’t want to reform anything. There are no worse things than the reformers. They are ambitious” (VD 219). In Cossery’s work, as in his family, the privileged do not think of criticizing the social system that granted them these benefits. Readers of Ala’a al-Aswany will no doubt find similarities between the fallen aristocrat Zaki Dessouki in The Yakoubian Building and these little renters in Cossery’s work.
In the Cosserian universe, there are two types of individuals: Gohar explains it to the policeman who is leading the investigation into Arnaba’s murder: “There are only the bastards” (MO 195), and next to the “scumbags” (also called “scumbags”) the characters of the groups of merry drills that are the main protagonists that Cossery stages.
Gohar (Beggars and Pride) leads, in his own way, a kind of struggle: “By non-cooperation […] I simply refuse to cooperate in this immense deception” (MO160).
The vocabulary changes a little: deception, sham, universal sham… but the idea is a constant of Cossery’s mature works, and it reaches its final form in Violence and Derision.
In this novel, assisted by a group of merry drills, the dandy Heykal undertakes to distribute a poster in which the governor is praised in such extravagant terms that no one will be fooled, in order to destroy the reputation of the governor. The project succeeded perfectly: the first person who saw the poster laughed so loudly that she died instantly. He then asked the press to open a subscription to erect a statue in honour of the governor. The project runs short, because the governor, forced by the government to resign, is assassinated by a revolutionary. Heykal’s intention boils down to: “To a dead tyrant I prefer a ridiculed tyrant. It’s more durable as a pleasure” (VD 304). The intervention of the revolutionary made the governor a martyr, thus depriving the friends of their pleasure.
Cossery’s work contains sympathetic revolutionaries, such as El-Kordi in Beggars and Pride — he is sympathetic because his desire is to help the suffering, but above all because he is absolutely incapable of carrying out effective action. Karim, the friendly kite maker in Violence and Derision, is a repentant revolutionary, and when he meets Taher, one of his former revolutionary comrades, on the Corniche, if they still feel tenderness for each other, Taher is doomed to hatred, Karim to joy.
Overall, the revolution is part of the universal imposture, because revolutionaries are motivated by ambition, which, in the Cossery universe, is a negative value. This is beautifully illustrated in An Ambition in the Desert, set in a small emirate, whose prime minister conceives the luminous idea of fomenting a revolution against his own government; if the revolution fails, he will be the saviour of the nation, and if it succeeds its power will be strengthened. Whether it is the revolution or the status quo that prevails, basically nothing will have changed.
In each of Cossery’s novels, there is a group of men, bound by respect and friendship, and what some characters do not hesitate to call “love”. With our Western sensibility, we might be tempted to consider them homosexuals. That is not true, however; Cossery is aware of the existence of homosexuality, and under the name of “inverted” there are a number of homosexual characters who are not necessarily always unsympathetic beings, but the idea of a possible claim to identity does not even touch him.
Groups of friends are mostly heterosexuals, but heterosexuals whose romantic relationships play a marginal role. Thus, for example, Gohar does not seem to have sexual urges, while Yéghen confines himself to addressing poems to a young lady he meets in the street, and El-Kordi thinks he is in love with a toxic prostitute whom he would betray with another if the opportunity arose.
In fact, in all of Cossery’s work, no woman plays a leading role. There are prostitutes who walk around in cabs, reminiscent of La Maison Tellier of Maupassant, and very young girls, often butt pickers, whose poverty is probably an easy prey. It’s easy to see what a convinced feminist would say.
Gohar, who has just killed a young prostitute, so to speak, says he is “grateful to women for the enormous amount of stupidity they brought into human relationships” (MO 131).
In any case, none of Cossery’s novels contain what could really be called a “love story” and the predilection of his characters for the very young would be something worrying if we stopped there.
Karim, in The Violence and Derision, calls all the women he manages to lure into his home “Zouzou” and when, after a particularly tender night of love, he pushes the romanticism to the point of asking the girl her real name, this is an exception, a violation of the rule.
It is, if I may say so, a “homosocial” universe where the bonds between men are emptied of all sexual content. The superiority of man is demonstrated by Gohar’s neighbor, a man’s trunk, in whom, if we can say, manhood is reduced to his simplest expression, and to whom his wife nevertheless makes scenes of jealousy. Cossery’s male characters have the natural advantage of being born men, but in fact, if they take advantage of it by the agreed privileges that this state confers, it is in some way an honorary superiority.
The moral superiority of groups of friends is not at the level of their political action, since, precisely, they do not take any action, except to stay away from those they consider bastards. When Gohar, a sympathetic character among all and, in a way, the guru of the group, kills the prostitute Arnaba, it is a kind of incident of course that does not draw consequence: “it was as if he thought of an unfortunate accident of which he would have been the helpless and horrified witness” (MO 84). Thus, gay lurons manage to keep their distance from their actions, while the “scumbags” they despise are overwhelmed by their own. But Cossery does not invite us to push the analysis so far.
Gohar kills poor Arnaba while he is in need of drugs, under the effect of the shimmer of the bracelets that the girl wears. It is difficult, at least for Westerners, not to see it as a memory of Meursault’s crime in Camus’s The Stranger; moreover, this murder is precisely described as a “free crime”. If the Egyptian Cossery evokes the Eastern world, he does so by addressing a European audience, whose culture he knows thoroughly.
University or school curricula tend to bring similar authors closer together because of their ideas or artistic or political projects. Often, their art is used, in spite of themselves sometimes, to validate a political project, as is the case in Quebec. No government could claim Cossery without compromising its own legitimacy, since for Cossery, the “universal sham” calls into question the good faith of any government. Unable to integrate into our usual rankings, Albert Cossery does not proceed to fascinate his faithful readers who willingly follow him in a fictitious Egypt, which does not correspond in any way to the country as we know it today, and where only human values prevail.
[1]* Trinity Dublin College.
Albert COSSERY
(3 novembre 1913, le Caire, 22 juin 2008, Paris)
A French-speaking Egyptian writer
Irene[1]FENOGLIO
“I am a writer who writes in French. I am an Egyptian writer”
“Egypt has never left me”
“I told you that I did not leave Egypt… »
Albert COSSERY
The reissue of the whole work of Albert Cossery by Joelle Losfeld in 1993 seems to me to be an event and this reissue tells the importance of this work and its peculiarity.
When I started working on Albert Cossery and French in Egypt, there was a lot of trying to discourage me. Cossery himself, who always told me when I met him for my thesis: “But why do you work so hard, you don’t have something better to do ?… ». It was in 1982, 1983, to develop this thesis (the first on his work), I conducted with him various interviews that allowed me, among other things, to establish elements for his biography.
After being recognized and read in the 1950s and 1960s, Albert Cossery was somewhat forgotten and, in the 1980s, he was read very little in France and was no longer reissued. So, to read and work on the short stories The Forgotten Men of God, I had to photocopy a copy of it, at Pierre-Jean Oswald, his last publisher, it seems, before Joelle Losfeld.
As for Egypt, we did not want to hear about this French-speaking space that I will quickly describe, and from which Cossery came, because it represented the Old Regime, that before the Nasser Revolution. Which is true, of course, for one part. But on the other hand, this extraordinary cultural space that is unlike any other sociolinguistic situation: a language chosen by the local intellectual elite and used to write, create, publish when it has no geographical proximity to Egypt, nor a political reason to be established there — Egypt is not a French colony — while each community that practices it has its own language (Arabic , Greek, Albanian, Armenian…), this cultural space belongs rightfully to Egypt, this creative period cannot be taken away from its heritage. I fought to defend this position in Egypt when I was there as well as in France where it is very quickly evacuated as a situation similar to the French situation as it presents itself in the Maghreb (thus from colonization) or as it presents itself in Lebanon (thus from a protectorate), when the conditions are very different.
[1]* Director of Research Emeritus, CNRS. Head of the Linguistics team at the Institute of Modern Texts and Manuscripts (CNRS/ENS, Paris).
Contexte et panorama : le français en Égypte
Little happens in a society that does not affect, in one way or another, the use of languages: abandonment of certain languages or levels of language, intervention of foreign languages, appearances of new uses, literary and journalistic production. Conversely, language uses inevitably affect global social dynamics. These processes are always very slow and not directly visible, rooted in many ways and diverse in social history, in the daily life of individuals, in the development of techniques of expression.
In Egypt, between 1850 and 1960, a share of society — minimal in the number of individuals who make up it in relation to the Egyptian population as a whole, but very substantial in terms of its social role — was Francophone. From this social ensemble was born a cultural production in the French language prodigious and very diverse (newspapers, magazines, all literary genres).
Various historical and social elements combined, during the second half of the 19th century, to establish a situation marked, at the same time, by the existence of an indigenous aristocracy, whose fortune was based on land ownership, which was initially the only “class” to be able to invest, at the level of habitus, on the acquisition of a second culture language; it was followed in its ambitions at the beginning of the 20th century by the nascent bourgeoisie and by the many cosmopolitan communities.
Much like in 19th century Russia, French in Egypt has always represented culture, and perhaps only that. The French who came to implement it by force (Napoleon Bonaparte and his Expedition) left leaving behind the means of culture (printing, Institute … etc.) without the presence of inopportune settlers. At the same time their struggle for influence with the English, who were going to occupy Egypt militarily, meant that the French language could be chosen and appreciated without bad conscience (at least until 1956)
The use of the French language thus contributed to maintaining, through the linguistic gap, a social elite that played its part until after the 1952 revolution.
There are several points to note. The use of French was then the essential component of a system of worldly conviviality — it was the language used at the Court — and cultural within the social space frequented by the social elite. Indeed, public and urban life is based on the use of French. This language is used in any mixed court (anything that is not “indigenous courts”), it is used in the civil state. French is used for daily instructions: names of streets, shops, cinemas. Cairo was nicknamed “Little Paris.”
The teaching of French in Egypt, combined with the social conditions in which it was carried out, allowed that the French language was not only “consumed” but that it gave rise to a real production of large scale and high level.
First, it is worth noting the production of an impressive number of French-language newspapers and periodicals, most of which are run by Egyptian editorial teams; yearly and all genres, the figure of 150 titles can be put forward. To give some more precise figures: in 1938, 200 periodicals in Arabic and 65 in foreign languages were published in Cairo: 44 were in French and 5 in English (8 in Greek, 4 in Armenian, 1 in Turkish, 1 in Italian, 1 in Persian, 1 in Hindustani). The figures are also telling for Alexandria: out of 31 foreign language periodicals, 20 are in French, 1 in English (7 in Greek, 4 in Italian), in Port Said, out of 4 in foreign language, 3 are in French (the other is Greek).
A literary breakthrough of very high level of creativity in the 1920s-1950s. It is only to mention names such as those of Edmond Jabès, Georges Henein, Albert Cossery who made their first works in Egypt before being “recovered” by France and completely obscured by Egypt from the 1960s until today.
French was used against English during the Second World War: it was a way for this cosmopolitan Egyptian elite (Jews of various origins but also from Egypt, Greeks, Levantine, Syro-Lebanese, Palestinians, Armenians, Turks, Albanians, Italians, more numerous, at least than the few English and French.
Here’s what Albert Cossery told me in an interview:
“I put up posters against the English. We would go to the movies, and then we would go to the bathroom, because the cinemas were full of English soldiers, and then we would put the posters over the urinal (an idea I took up in Violence and Derision). »
Since 1990 some Egyptian critics have begun to take an interest in this space of French-speaking literary creation. Witness the December 1996 issue of Ibdâ magazine, which is entirely devoted to “Egyptian literature in French.” Ahmad Abd el Mûatî Hegâzî, in the title of his presentation article, asks the question: “How can literary works written, in the French language by Egyptians as well as foreigners living in Egypt, be located? Can these works be considered an integral part of Egypt’s cultural heritage, given the environment they reflect, the ideas and feelings they express? ».
An echo — anachronistic in a way — is an article by Foulad Yeghen, published in The Egyptian Stock Exchange, in 1946. Foulad Yeghen, Egyptian historian and critic, friend of Albert Cossery, became, under his name, a Cossery character in Beggars and Pride; Here are excerpts
To Ahmad Abd el Mûatî Hegâzî’s questions, I answer this and insist: yes, writing French, in Egypt, at that time, is the manifestation of an assumed acculturation. Egyptians do not write in French to express the divorce between their culture of origin and the language of expression chosen, nor do they write to express nostalgia for their place of origin, an exile, voluntary or involuntary, they write to write; they are free and available for any writing. I would like to emphasize the national aspect of this movement; yes, Egyptian literature in French rightfully belongs to the Egyptian cultural ensemble that it has enriched and on which it continues to have effects.
I would like, in fact, to break with the pattern that Westernization is necessarily anti-nationalist, or contrary to national development. The use of French in Egypt, too, was “national.” National development is not only in what is programmed to be nationalistic. The emblematic role of foreign language learning: conformity to Western or even colonial models, is not related in Egypt to the actual use that has been made of them. French, however introduced by Catholic Missions in a predominantly Muslim country, is not only consumed but used to increase cultural production. There is no appropriation of a foreign language superimposed on self-appropriation out of disinterest in its language, but openness of its cultural heritage by increasing linguistic capital.
For the legend around this cosmopolitanism, it is enough to consider all the myths forged around Alexandria and Cairo and the novels to which they gave rise. But for the reality of the Egyptian situation, it must be remembered that it was during this period that the French language was “chosen” against English. Relying on a language foreign to the territory, but also foreign to the occupying power (Turkish and then British), leaving no space for the establishment of a “language of colonization,” it will have a diversionary function in the national construction of the country and will be used against English and the British presence.
This balance reveals its fragility during the 1952 revolution, when the “Free Officers” with Nasser took power. They do not belong to the French-speaking aristocratic elite. They come from the small and middle-class urban, trained in government and military schools and therefore rather English-speaking. They carry out a revolution and it passes, it makes sense, if only for simple needs of communication, by the maximum use of Arabic.
The Nasserian revolution does not explicitly project or implement linguistic policy. But, insensitively, from a language of cultural communication and worldly conviviality not foreign to those who practice it, as a cultural vehicle, French is moving to the status of a foreign language of teaching. The function of French in Egypt is reassessed in relation to its social status. The Nasserian Revolution — quite logically, since it wants and will be popular — was spoken in Arabic, the language of the future was Arabic, the language of pan-Arabism, French was going back to the past, could only say the “old Regime”. In fact, the situation reversed abruptly between 1952 and 1958. 1952: The Nasserian revolution, which re-aligned and legitimized the official and political use of Arabic. 1956: Suez crisis forced France to be rejected as part of the coalition against Egypt alongside Britain and Israel. 1958: Triumph of Pan-Arabism.
Today, in Egypt, the language of acculturation is English, a foreign language integrated into daily cultural life. English (American) has a “democratic” status while French had an elitist status. At the same time, it does not imply the cultural borrowing involved in the use of the French language; English is rather an instrument whereas the use of French constituted a direct participation in a different cultural life, an opportunity for literary creation.
I must say that it is thanks to the long work on this Egyptian francophone phenomenon that I have been able to think otherwise of the much-maligned notion of cosmopolitanism. One could, at first, define cosmopolitanism as the character of a social group marked by the multiplicity of attachments of each: national, confessional or linguistic attachments. That’s how dictionaries define it. They add this negative nuance: “cosmopolitan” would refer to the attitude of one who refuses the limits of a nation.
Cosmopolitanism is nothing more than a social effect of different interweavings, overlapping of affiliations and loyalties, but the “talking” differently must agree to participate together in this phenomenon and build it up dynamically. The common path in Egypt has been the voice of a language. The mobilization that took place in Egypt around French. This mobilization gave substance to cosmopolitanism and also offered it a symbolic gratification. But it must be understood that the mobilization around French in Egypt has built this cosmopolitanism as much as it is derived from it since the different communities have been maintained thanks to this cultural vehicle and as long as this cultural vehicle existed.
But while most French-speaking Egyptian writers wrote in French in Egypt (Ahmed Rassim, Georges Henein…), Albert Cossery wrote about Egypt but from France. What was his background?
The Life of Albert Cossery
An Egyptian from Fegallah
Albert Cossery has always refused to participate in the development of a precise biography about him: “I don’t have a biography. I have done nothing in life. All I did was have fun (I.F., 1982-1983). However, as the interviews progress, we can see most of its trajectory.
Albert Cossery was born in Cairo, Fegallah, on November 2, 1913. He is the latest in a family that already has three children: two brothers (Maurice and Edmond) and a sister. The family is originally from Damiette in the Nile Delta where he served the summers of his childhood. Her father is a landowner, her parents are Arabic-speaking and her mother is illiterate:
“It was a very strange family. […] all I know is that my father did not work, that the money was in his secretary. […] when he opened his secretary, he took the money and put it in flower vests. My father would wake up at noon, it took two hours to get dressed and he taught me one thing: it is from him that I hold this arrogance, this contempt… (I.F.)
The family is Christian, of Greek Orthodox rite.
In 1921, Albert Cossery joined the College of the Brothers of La Salle, in the district of Daher, he remained there until 1926:
“When I brought him my school booklet to sign, he would say, “I don’t have time! Tomorrow!… Bôkra! bôkra!” he had nothing to do, but the idea of taking a pen, dipping it in ink… so I brought him the pen, he said to me, “This feather is bad !…” (I.F.)
He will explain that it is thanks to the presence of his older brothers that he will be able to learn, but in a non-school way, by reading all kinds of books: “I was reading Paul Valery when I was 10 because there were poems by Paul Valery on hand. (I.F.)
In 1926, he graduated from the College for the Lycée de Bab el Louq, French High School of the French Secular Mission. He will only go to it as he pleases.
After many initial attempts, he made his first trip to France in 1931:
“I thought to myself, if I am not a writer and if I do not live in Paris, to make the wedding, my life is not worth living. And let’s say I did that, I managed to come to Paris, at the age of eighteen and I made the wedding there. (I.F.)
In the same year, the collection of poems Les Morsures was published.
In 1939-1940, Albert Cossery left for the United States and returned to Cairo where, from 1942 to 1945, he lived between the “European city” and the Citadel district:
“I was not a “Sir” who lived only in the European city. . . . Do you know the “El Fechawi” coffee? Well! I describe it in Beggars and Proud. I was there every night until six in the morning. I lived in an old house. . . . I had an apartment there, finally a house, it would be fairer, it is the “house of certain death” that I describe in my book. I stayed at the moucharabieh, I listened to what was going on in the courtyard … and all the characters I described in The House of Certain Death were there. (I.F.)
In Cairo, Cossery participates in lively cultural activities: painters, Egyptian and foreign writers, conferences, exhibitions. This is how the painter El Telmissany will make his portrait:
From Cairo, advised by Albert Camus, he signed a contract with the publisher Charlot for his collection of short stories The Forgotten Men of God, which was published almost simultaneously in French and Arabic. Henry Miller will publish it in the United States comparing its author to Dostoyevsky and Gorky.
It was in this context of success that he decided to leave for Paris.
A Parisian Egyptian
Albert Cossery, who has lived exclusively in Paris since 1945, has not, as he himself says, left Egypt, “his” Egypt, an Egypt that can be considered both tenacious and ephemeral, incessantly present and fragile. Tenacious, present: it is his permanent source of inspiration, it is his place of residence so internalized that he can walk it and transport it every step in Paris, he places it on each of the tables he occupies in the Parisian cafes that welcome him, he fantasizes in the garden of Luxembourg:
“I can live in Paris as if I were living in an oasis. I go to the Luxembourg garden and there are palm trees and so I sit in the shade of the palm tree and I receive Egyptian friends, in the middle of Paris, under a palm tree!” (I.F, 1982-1983).
From 1945, Albert Cossery lived in Paris, a city he never left, except for a few returns to Egypt, the first, thirty-five years after his departure, in 1975:
“I was very anxious when I returned to Egypt, 35 years after I left it. Seeing a country after 35 years! and even the family, going to see “old people” is terrible!” (I.F, 1982-1983)
He never left the very centre of Paris, Saint-Germain des Prés where “his” hotel is located, always the same for very, very long years. He died there on June 22, 2008. Yet he will never live there in an idealization of neither France nor the West:
“I never had the myth of the West. I was just thinking about Paris. I never wanted to go anywhere else. Because Paris was an extraordinary city, I came to Paris.” (I.F, 1982-1983)
Albert Cossery refuses to take anything seriously on his own. The simplicity of his life, reduced to the essentials: his only person, “without family, without an apartment, without a car” reflects and carries the fundamental stripping of his hero characters: “I am an anarchist who believes in nothing. I believe only in life, friendship and love… “(I.F, 1982-1983).
In 1998, he was diagnosed with cancer of the vocal cords and was hospitalized for surgery. After this operation he will lose his voice and will use writing to communicate.
A Work of Unique Inspiration: Egypt
It was in Paris, therefore, that he had always chosen to live, in order to be able to write it, Egypt:
“The years I spent in Egypt fed me. I knew how to capture everything after writing it in my books, but without taking notes, without anything. “(I.F, 1982-1983)
He finally moved away from it and found it inside him, unchanged, as he left it in 1945. His Egypt lives and will live only transcribed in his eight novels published today.
In my thesis, I argued that Albert Cossery, although publishing only in French, spoke in Egyptian; For this reason I was particularly analyzing the many dialogues, essential in his work. Albert Cossery confirms this when he responds to Michel Mitrani:
“…… I think in Arabic, that is, I give a turn to my sentence which is not a Parisian or, say, Western turn. For conversations or lines, I think in Arabic. But, at the same time, my whole style takes a completely different form than if I were writing about Paris or something else. Not to give the impression that it is a Frenchman who writes about Egypt…
[…] there is always in my mind the Arab atmosphere, the way of speaking. You know, even a character who says, “Hello,” there’s something behind it. It is never a European-like hello, that is, it means nothing. And I have to give it back.” (M.M., 1990)
But in Cossery’s work as a whole, there are two “writings.”
The collection of short stories The Forgotten Men of God and The House of Certain Death constitute a revolutionary writing, collectively calling for solidarity and revolt against injustice: the poor of the “indigenous” city against the rich of the “European” city:
“The world doesn’t need big things. Men are hungry (…) and all the hungry dream only of bread. Everything else is crazy. (The hungry only dream of bread.)
“The man who had come to the end of his misery was trying to understand. And that was the way it was. (The hairdresser killed his wife.)
But the rest of his work, starting from The Lazy in the Fertile Valley is rather a call to individualism, to individual freedom, to an elitism, an aristocracy even of intelligence. Of course, a refusal of society and its organization, but the revolt is no longer meant to be collective:
“Everything was ridiculous and easy . . . There was nothing tragic about the teeming misery that surrounded him. The futility of all this misery appeared to him at every step and delighted him” (Beggars and proud)) »
“He had made peace with this laughable and detestable world. He didn’t want to change anything; he took it as it is, with its wretched and its blind, it was like a huge need for love. He no longer believed in the misery of the people.” (Violence and derision))
“I think and write in French while my characters are shaped with the silt of the Nile,” he says. It is always a question of favouring the being over the having: the resourceless beings can keep their dignity, the only luxury of the poor. To prioritize individual freedom.
Another element than the writing itself manifests the Egyptianity of the author, humor. The humour of Cossery is truly, the material, the “paste” through which his writings take shape, he bathes and orients the wanderings and palavers of his characters. In the early works it is an ambient humor, daily, harmless, sticking to gestures to avoid direct confrontation and prevent aggression, allow “sympathy”, in a word. In the latest works, such as Violence and Derision, for example, there is a more offensive and subversive irony, a real derision, one that removes and brings down from their pedestal those who desperately try to take themselves seriously: “I cannot stand people who take themselves seriously; they are ridiculous!” (I.F, 1982-1983)
Some critics have allowed a rapprochement between Albert Cossery and Naguib Mahfouz, it would be the French version of Naguib Mahfouz, I do not think. Of course, they both use the “realistic” spring, but unlike the author of The Stories of Our Neighbourhood (French Act South, 1999), Cossery does not live in Egypt, expressed his memory of Egypt that he knew without following its evolution. Naguib Mahfouz followed in his work and his means of literary expression the Egypt he inhabited daily, Cossery inhabited Egypt from his memories.
La Langue Française d’expression Egyptienne d’Albert Cossery
Albert Cossery thought in Arabic, wrote in French, described Egypt and only Egypt and its men. His French is colored with it all.
Albert Cossery was criticized for a “nonchalant” style, a lack of “brilliance”, an ease. In fact, the lack of research is real but it is that Cossery’s style must be that of his characters; Cossery does not want to exceed, by his own language, the language of his characters.
In one of his last interviews, here’s what he says:
“After The Colors of Infamy, I had started a new book, but I am not writing anymore. I have too much difficulty sitting and holding the pen because of osteoarthritis. I wrote in my room, with a Bic, in hand, applying as much as possible so that those who then typed my texts had no difficulty re-reading me. I was doing almost no scratches, I was waiting to write to find the right word. I could look for it for several days. There are no sentences for nothing in my books. That’s why I wrote so slowly. »
As for the French language adopted by these Egyptian writers, I would like to quote these words from Edmond Jabès, another contemporary French-speaking Egyptian by Albert Cossery who in this beautiful book entitled The Book of Hospitality, in the chapter “Hospitality of Language” says: “Language is hospitable. It doesn’t take into account our origins. Since it can only be what we get out of it, it is nothing but what we expect from us. ». A language belongs to all who speak it, the French language belongs in its own right to all those who use it, including the Egyptians who at some point in the history of this country, have chosen it to express themselves.
Conclusion
“I am Egyptian for the good reason that my mother spoke only Arabic to me, my mother knew no language other than Arabic and I at the age of 6, 8, 7 years old, I was a reader already at the cinema because she liked to go to the cinema, it was a cinema near the house, she needed me to translate it, because she could neither read nor write my mother. There were the “cards” in French, in Egypt, they were in French the boxes of films. And I have great remorse, it came after, because when you are young you have no remorse; after the age of 10, 12 years, I no longer wanted to go with my mother to the movies and so she could not go alone.” (I.F.)
“Egypt is always in my imagination for me. I have never forgotten Egypt. For this reason, by the way, I am still Egyptian! I didn’t ask for a French passport, because I wanted to stay Egyptian. I have never betrayed my country!… Just because I write in French and live in Paris doesn’t mean I’m no longer Egyptian… (M.M., 10)
“What matters is the context of the works, not the language in which we express them, the books are translated and everyone can read them, my first book was immediately translated into English and Arabic. A language is not enough to determine a literary identity. I am Egyptian, I feel Egyptian although living in Paris and writing in French, so I am an Egyptian writer. Even when I wrote for Arabic newspapers, I wrote in French and was translated, I never published anything in Arabic. I like to chisel the French language, but it is the Egyptian atmosphere, the Egyptian Arabic that I transpose, it is the formulas, the sayings, the turns of my native country that I use… »
Albert Cossery never applied for French nationality, all his life, he kept only one passport: the Egyptian.
FENOGLIO Irene, 1985, Albert Cossery, Egyptian writer of French and Egyptian expression, Thesis, University of Paris IV-Sorbonne, Institute of Francophone Studies.
FENOGLIO Irene, 1987, “Albert Cossery, a search for authenticity” in Chabramant Papers 3-4, Cairo, pp.174-193.
FENOGLIO Irene, 1987, “Autobiography… Albert Cossery” in Chabramant’s Cahiers 3-4, Cairo, pp.195-200.
FENOGLIO Irene, 1999, “The Egypt of Albert Cossery” in Entre Nile et sable: Writers of Egyptian French Expression (1920-1960), Paris, CNDP ed, 1999, 127-133.
GAZIO Pierre, 1999, “The Egyptian Savoir-vivre of Albert Cossery” in Entre Nile et sable: Writers of Egyptian French-speaking (1920-1960), Paris, CNDP ed, 1999, 105-112.
HENEIN Georges, 1956, “The Contribution of Albert Cossery,” in Calligrams, Cairo, pp. 17-23.
KOBER Marc, 1999, “Inaction and the Cry in the Mirror” in Between Nile and Sand: Writers of Egyptian French-speaking (1920-1960), Paris, CNDP ed, 1999, 113-126.
MITRANI Michel, 1995, Conversation with Albert Cossery, Ed. Joelle Losfeld, Paris.
COSSERY et GOLO
Guy Nadaud, known as Golo, was born in Bayonne in 1948. He arrived in Paris in 1968 and began to make comics through reports on rock concerts for Best magazine in the early 1970s. He published Ballades pour un Voyou, his first comic book in collaboration with Frank, in the editions of the Square (1979). From this collaboration will be born several stories published in the magazines Charlie Monthly, The Echo of the Savannahs, Chic, Pilot, The Other Journal, (To follow)… These stories will then be edited by the Futuropolis of Etienne Robial and Florence Cestac, Dargaud, Casterman.
It is to (To follow) that he undertakes the adaptation of Albert Cossery’s book: Beggars and Pride. The discovery of this book in 1968 was decisive in his life choices. Albert Cossery immediately put him at ease by giving him his consent, leaving him completely free and answering all the questions he asked him. After this dive into the world of Cossery, he decided to settle in Cairo where, since 1993, he drew for the local press and produced exhibitions with the theme of the streets of Cairo, while continuing his comics work for French publishers.
After a retrospective exhibition in Cairo “1974-2014, 40 years of drawings on Egypt”, he settled in 2014 for a new adventure on the ship of the House of Authors in Angoulème where he directed Istrati! , a story drawn around the life and work of Romanian writer Panait Istrati. This album was included in the official selection of the Angoulême International Comic Festival 2018.
“He was found dead lying on the floor in his small student room at the Louisiana hotel, which he had occupied for more than 50 years. In a burst of modesty or pride, two words that characterize him, he had taken the time, before dying, to put a blanket on his slimmed-down body. As if he had wanted to make himself presentable to those who would discover him.
For a long time now his health had been declining: two cancers in his throat had been over his vocal cords, and his legs were no longer wearing it very surely. But with the help of a cane or a helping arm, he found the energy to walk daily the distance between the Louisiana hotel and café de Flore, of which he was one of the pillars.
It was there that we met in 1971, on the occasion of the project to bring to the screen one of his novels, Beggars and Proud. I had long been an admiring reader, and I was delighted by the idea of playing Gohar, the philosopher’s beggar, in the cinema. Our common Egyptian birth and the same view we had on life and the world created an unfailing complicity between us. A conscientious dilettante, he wrote sparingly but with great rigour and gave laziness a subversive ideological meaning — like some of the popular sages I had known in Cairo, who teach seriously the art of idleness.
The events of the film-making brought us even closer. In the Tunisian setting that was supposed to represent our native Egypt, we found the playful behavior of the Middle East — everything was a pretext to amuse us with all situations. The choice of pretty extras and the good tables of Carthage became more important than the requirements of the shoot. The film had a more than confidential career. “It had failed, but it will have succeeded in our friendship,” he confided to me as a consolation.
Georges MOUSTAKI
Beggars and Pride is a 1972 Franco-Tunisian film by Gérard Poitrenaud, adapted from Cossery’s novel of the same name — Screenplay: Gérard Poitrenaud, Georges Moustaki, Albert Cossery. Lead actors: Georges Moustaki, Gabriele Ferzetti, Gérard Falconetti, Nadia Samir. Music: Georges Moustaki.
Albert COSSERY:
Refusal of the Claim or the Claim of Refusal
Professor David L.[1]Parris
I published in Peter Lang (in 2009) a short book under the title Albert Cossery, a Man’s Watcher (in reference to the monkey watcher in the Cosserian work) where I review the eight novels of this author, which can be found in two volumes at Joelle Losfeld. There is no need, then, to go back to what I have already said elsewhere, and which was intended as an introduction to the work of a writer that the public would benefit from knowing. In particular, in the last chapter, I discuss the notion of “Egyptianity of Cossery” (p. 135-145).
Based on three of Cossery’s books, published in 1955, 1964 and 1984, I will try to highlight what I dare not call Cossery’s political ideas and that it is probably not appropriate to name his “philosophy” either, a way of answering the question of what is the position of this writer from the East in relation to the two worlds to which he claims, in a certain way, to no longer belong: neither the East nor the West.
… Languages
civilization…
If all men are born equal in rights and dignity, the same is not true for languages, some of which are called to a glorious destiny, and others to oblivion. At the very first, the so-called “great languages of civilization,” which means, in short, by a reversal of the order of the elements: “languages of great civilizations.”
The languages of great civilization are, when you think about it, the languages of the great colonial powers. The Arabic “isti’amr” which refers to colonization suggests the contribution of a gift of culture. Between “great civilization” languages and their literary culture, there is such a close connection that one defines the other: French is therefore “the language of Molière”, English “the language of Shakespeare” and Spanish “the language of Cervantes”. Nothing like this for Scandinavian languages, or even modern Greek, yet still seen by the prestige of its ancestor. It is obvious that the colonial powers brought in their luggage a considerable cultural good, namely their language, and that it was later used by writers from the colonies who in turn came to enrich European cultures. The French tend to theorize this literature through the notion of “Francophonie” (sympathetic family gathering), while the Anglo-Saxons prefer the idea of “postcolonial literature”, less specific, in fact, to obscure the evils of colonialism. This difference is significant, because in the Anglo-Saxon world authors of Indian, Pakistani, African and other
origins are an integral part of English (language) literature, while in the French-speaking field, the authors outside have a canon of their own, and the structure that welcomes them (thus, the Francophonie) places them under house arrest in a secondary area, which is to French literature what purgatory is to paradise.
Albert Cossery certainly uses the “language of great civilization” that is French, but because of his Egyptian origins, does not really fit into a French canon and several things tend to marginalize him compared to the Egyptian French-language writers, to whom Jean-Jacques Luthi has devoted several books. Cossery is not, strictly speaking, postcolonial either, because the language of the colonizer in Egypt was English, and the role of French, in simplifying, was to offer privileged access to modernity without carrying all the negative connotations of colonialism.
Post-colonial writers seem to focus on their childhood, and this literature consists largely of what the Germans call “bildungsroman”. Whether it is Camara Laye’s Black Child or Fouad Laroui’s A Year with the French (or others), what concerns these authors is the (painful) separation from the culture of origin and the path to a knowledge of European culture. Nothing like this in Cossery, whose universe is populated by adults, and where childhood (like women, for that matter) plays only a minor role.
… immoral narrative
of an unpunished crime…
Let us now reflect on the moral world of these men, starting with Beggars and Pride, the immoral account of an unpunished crime, or better yet, the critique of a morality that claims to punish crimes.
Lying, by a curious combination of circumstances, alone with the prostitute Arnaba, on a whim, Gohar kills her. “These gold bracelets had triggered a considerable emotion in him. He could no longer escape their contemplation. Within seconds, he had a glare […] OC1 35. Later, to his friend Yéghen, Gohar said, “I can’t explain anything to you. It always seems to me that someone else acted for me. But don’t think I want to exonerate myself. Nothing can ever justify violence.” OC1 141. So we’re dealing with a pacifist killer! This is reminiscent of another moment of glare leading to the crime, the one that rocked the plot of Camus’s[1] Stranger, like Cossery born in 1913, and which Cossery had frequented as soon as he arrived in Paris. Where Meursault is condemned for not complying with the customs
of his society, Gohar escapes justice precisely because he has refused everything from the society of which this justice is a part.
The victim is this negligible amount of homosocial societies, the prostitute, and this negligible amount of colonial societies, the Arab.
Is this rapprochement with existentialist theory fortuitous? We read from the civilized and conscientious officer in charge of the investigation: “Nour El Dine was facing for the first time a difficult task: solving the enigma of a gratuitous crime” p. 61.
In Camus as much as in Cossery, it is more an act of absurdity than of the affirmation of freedom, as in Lafcadio in The Caves of the Vatican.
Literature is a complex and sometimes tense relationship between language and culture (or civilizations, but plural). A simple relationship would be one in which the language of a people would serve as a vehicle for a literature that refers to that people’s image of their own life. This approach may be reductive, but it is, at least initially, valid for most so-called “national” literatures.
French literature, since and thanks to Louis XIV, began to “radiate”, that is to say to illuminate places still supposedly immersed in darkness, by the brilliance to its superiority, like the famous coat of arms of which Louis XIV adorned his palaces, and in a way that implies a movement of influence in one way, without the possibility of reciprocity.
… link between language
culture…
When France had created its colonial empire, however, we began to see a radiation in the opposite direction, in the form of a “French-speaking” literature, sending back an unflattering image of France, if one will, but flattering at least to the extent that it still concerned France, even in what France had the most to complain about.
This is why Maghreb literature has become so important, closely followed by sub-Saharan African literature. These literatures are about the evils of colonization.
Thus, other literatures, possibly of greater aesthetic value, go almost unnoticed; as is the case with Quebec and French literature. Quebecers have the “wrong” to speak for themselves, and to mention only occasionally the French, who generally find them uninteresting. The link between language and culture can be further diminished. Cossery rightly describes himself as a “French-language writer.” His case is similar to that of Dany Laferrière, an author born in Haiti and then settled in Quebec, but who describes himself as an “American writer of French language”: “And when I tell you that I am an American writer writing directly in French, not a French-speaking » [1] writer”. If we follow Laferrière’s thinking, Cossery is not a French-speaking author, but we can agree on this way of seeing things or not, it is obvious that he does not refer to the French any image of themselves, because never, under any circumstances, has
Cossery created any French character, nor described any aspect of French life. In this respect, he will be distinguished from, say, Abdellah Taïa, who certainly describes his journey towards European culture, a route that must have been that of Cossery as a young man, but which criticizes the bad faith of those he met in his passage.
… look for
fleeing the modern world…
The French language, its learning more or less difficult, or the difficulty of mastering Arabic, is often an important element in the French-language narrative, which is frequently, and unlike the case of Cossery, a “learning novel”. French offers privileged access to the modern world and offers the way to escape the past world of Arabic. But the modern world, in Cossery, is precisely what his characters seek to escape. French is used to express this idea, of course, but does not in itself have a positive role.
The French presence, or perhaps rather European in this text, is a kind of aporia.
El Kordi’s “futile” character is “under the influence of a whole European literature that claims to make women the centre of a mystery” OC1 p. 88. In this he is perhaps to be compared to Albert Cohen’s Mangeclous, who derides Anna Karenina as the type of sentimental bad faith.
The characters of Beggars and Proud, novel of 1955, avoid the European city, and Gohar even fled it, having been a teacher there in the past:
“It had taken him many years, the monotony of a lifetime devoted to study, before he judged his teaching to be at its true value: a monumental scam. For more than twenty years, he had taught criminal nonsense, subjected young brains to the yoke of an erroneous and smoky philosophy. OC1 131.
If, living in absolute destitution, with an orange chair and box and a mattress of old newspapers, Gohar seems to embody the oriental ascetic, he has reached this state after having disowned all that the European reader (and the colonizing power) could attach himself to.
The notion of identity, almost absent from Cossery’s work, is based on a principle of inclusion and resemblance. However, considerations of race or religion — even if the characters occasionally swear “by Allah”— are absent. Language plays a very small role, because towards the end of the interrogation of the clients he leads to the brothel where the prostitute Arnaba was killed, the officer Nour El Dine addresses the “frivolous” El Kordi in English, creating between them a complicity of the educated. Of course, Nour El Dine might as well have chosen French, except that the plot, supposed to take place in Arabic, is narrated in French. The language of the text is rather neutral, but has undergone a very small number of adaptations: the vow is absent, and the word “excellence” (presumably “hadradik”) is used to mark respect.
… the very strong affinity that binds
men…
Of course, complicity exists, but it was that, homosocial, the very strong affinity that binds men. Thus, the poet Yéghen seeks by all means to help Gohar almost as if he were a lover: “What I fear, master! But I’m afraid I’m going to lose you! I apologize for such selfishness. I know you don’t care what happens. But think of me. I can’t bear the thought of losing you.” OC1 p167.
Women, on the other hand, are excluded from this complicity; Gohar cheerfully despises them: “Gohar was grateful to women for the immense amount of stupidity they brought into human relations” OC1 p. 131. He reflects on the relationship between his neighbor and her husband, a truncated man, a man possessing only virile prerogative, but thus immeasurably superior to the woman.
The truncated man has an immense advantage: “He knows peace. He has nothing left to lose” OC1 p. 194. Friends find peace in misery; according to Gohar: “Life, real life, is childishly simple. There is no mystery. There are only bastards” OC1. 195. The main thing, then, is to distance ourselves from the bastards, to reject what Gohar calls elsewhere “the reality born of the imposture” OC1 p. 173.
Finally, Officer Nour El Dine is virtually certain that Gohar is the murderer he is looking for, but he abandons his investigation, his work and his way of life: “He had decided to resign and live by begging.” OC1 204.
A decade later, in 1964, Cossery published Violence and Derision. It has sometimes been suggested that the author is repeating himself. As far as he is concerned, even if it is not true, it must be recognized that these texts have an air of family.
Thus, in Violence and Derision, we find a group of men friends determined to have fun. They do not carry the same existence of asceticism as that practiced by Gohar. The main instigator of the plot referred to in this novel, Heykal, possesses “a truly aristocratic nature” OC2 p. 205, even though he lives modestly from an inheritance. He seeks sartorial elegance in a somewhat manic manner and treats his servant as the bourgeois did then. However, he also has a “personal beggar” OC2 p. 213, whom he treats as a friend. Young Karim, who is part of Heykal’s circle, says of him: “I love him, do you hear! Believe me, not only will I never part with him, but if he asked me for my life, I would agree to die.” OC2 297. Apart from that, what one can feel for a woman is little.
However, there is an increased, but marginalized, female presence, and significantly below the norms of political correctness. Thus, the rich trader and former convict Khaled Omar proclaims: “I am not one of those rich fools who change their cars every year and always keep the same woman. I change women every year and I don’t even have a car.” OC2 225.
… the “most despicable
band of scoundrels” …
Heykal is in league with Khaled, to whom he presents his ideas:
“The first is that the world we live in is governed by the most vile band of scoundrels that has ever soiled the earth’s soil.
[…]
The second is that they should not be taken seriously; because that is what they want. » OC2 218.
This claim is tantamount to what in Beggars and Proud already Cossery had called “the imposture” (otherwise, he says “deception”), and the “vile band of scoundrels” corresponds to the “scumbags” mentioned by Gohar.
However, it is not a question of fighting the vile bastards or scoundrels with revolutionary action: “I do not want to reform anything,” proclaims Heykal, “There is no worse than the reformers. They’re all ambitious. OC2 p219. Towards the end of the novel, Heykal says again: “To a dead tyrant, I prefer a ridiculed tyrant” OC2 p. 304.
Heykal’s action is to deride the current government, represented by the governor, by publishing a poster containing such excessive praise that no one can believe it. The company was so successful that the first to read the text, displayed in the casino toilet, died of a heart attack.
Then Heykal went so far as to propose in a newspaper that a subscription be opened to erect a statue of the governor, and although this was not quite the goal, the governor was summoned by the government to resign, proving that derision was a more powerful weapon than revolutionary action.
If, in Beggars and Proud, the refusal of ambition implies a total destitution, in The Violence and Derision, Heykal has a princely allure that makes for the admiration of his entourage, but manages, nevertheless, to stay away from ambition. Where Gohar had avoided contact with the world of power, Heykal approached, but to make fun of it. He succeeded, by derision, in provoking the dismissal of a governor, and realized by his means what the revolutionaries had never achieved by their own.
… the imposture
universelle…
A new stage in the reversal of values is reached in An Ambition in the Desert, published in 1984. Here, the word “ambition,” which we have already encountered more than once under Cossery’s pen, and with negative connotations, appears in the title. What is perhaps new is the word “desert,” because we are dealing here with the only one of Cossery’s eight books set elsewhere than in Egypt. The plot of Cossery’s other books is almost always in Cairo (once in Alexandria), and usually in urban areas. Unusually, the plot of An Ambition in the Desert takes place in an unidentified emirate, whose capital is called Dofa. Unlike the neighboring emirates, the country has no oil reserves.
The hero, Samantar, has Heykal’s aristocratic manners, and although part of the princely family, thinks only of his pleasures, and of his friends. Something seems suspicious to him in the revolutionary attacks that are taking place in the city, and he undertakes an investigation. While he takes a long time to uncover the truth, the perpetrators of the plot are his relatives. His uncle, the emirate’s prime minister, came up with the idea of strengthening his grip on power by fomenting a revolution against the government he leads, with the help of a close friend of Samantar’s. The project runs short when a young person begins to take the revolutionary project seriously and dies when the bomb he was carrying explodes prematurely. By a terrible reversal of fate, the young man who thus loses his life is the natural son of the Prime Minister, instigator of all the plot.
Thus, for once, the deception, the imposture that Cossery so often denounces takes shape, and the revolution, instead of being the opposite of the government of the day, becomes in a way the extension and the tool — the thing and its opposite having yet only one motive: ambition.
The universe is probably not Manichaean, at least not in the sense that the “good” (to use the vocabulary of westerners) are on one side and the bad on the other. Of course, Europe and its civilization — which Gohar denies after having spread it for a long time and of which Samantar fears the possible fallout in his country — is not a modern world offered to our admiration: so we are far from the author from a colonial milieu who uses the language of the colonizer to flatter him by making his own the principles of democracy and secularism.
But Arabs are just as capable as others of collaborating on and embodying the universal imposture. Cossery’s work, begun under the monarchy and extended under the regime of Nasser and his successors, lambasted both with the same bitterness. If the little people described by Cossery seem very friendly, nowhere is it said that another people would not be just as friendly.
One of the most endearing aspects of Cossery’s work is the deep friendship between men in the same group, and it is hard not to imagine the pleasure of sharing their intimacy. Of course, these characters are not lacking in picturesque and it is tempting to see it as a mark of their authenticity, and therefore of a kind of superiority. But Cossery claims no superiority for the East — only human and individual attachments count for him. Paradoxically, it is by refusing to teach a lesson to the Western world that he gives it one: but the renunciation in question is not mystical or religious, and does not stem from a specifically Oriental knowledge; we could practice it just as well in Europe, as Cossery did at Saint-Germain.
Gohar, in Beggars and Pride, embodies a kind of ideal, which is to deny all the comforts of life, and to live in absolute destitution. This ideal was perhaps that of Cossery, who did not want to own anything, and lived his whole life in the hotel. But in the rest of the work, there are men who lead an ordinarily comfortable life, provided, however, that they can do so without ever sacrificing ambition.
The wise man guards against the universal imposture by deriding it: the contempt of all power alone protects against contamination.
The use of French, but without using it to praise the values dear to French society, its lack of political correctness, or rather its disdain for things like women’s equality, its refusal to be the good — evolved thanks to the positive aspects of any Western colonization, direct or indirect — allied to its refusal to embody the stereotype of the Arab , make this interesting author on the fringes of French-language literature.
6] http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ile.en.ile/paroles/laferriere_celivre.html
5 “The light squirted on the steel and it was like a long, gleaming blade reaching me at the front. At the same time, the sweat amassed in my eyebrows poured down my eyelids and covered them with a warm, thick veil. My eyes were blinded behind this curtain of tears and salt. All I could feel was the cymbals of the sun on my forehead and, indiscriminately, the glaring sword sprang from the knife still in front of me. That burning sword was gnawing at my eyelashes and searching my painful eyes. That’s when everything faltered,” 88.
[1]* Trinity Dublin College.
SULFUR 