Investigating the experience of the Egyptian-Francophone poet and writer Joyce Mansour (1928-1986), her surrealist works, her troubled life, and her silenced and hidden life story is an act of immersion in ambiguity, anxiety, and risk. Delving into her papers, correspondence, and the details of her stories, excavating her writings and what has been written about her, and exploring her travels and stops between Cairo and Paris leads to exciting and unstable discoveries. These discoveries do not provide definitive answers but rather open up to creative chaos, drawing from creativity its pleasure, surprise, and spirit laden with possibilities, questions, and successive adventures.
Thus, excitement is a fundamental element in the book “Joyce Mansour… The Tuberose Baby Girl “, recently published by Safafa Publishing House in Cairo (2024). It was written by the Egyptian writer, artist, and translator Mohsen El Belasy, who is responsible for the international surrealist magazine “The Room “. It is a massive research book (611 pages) that is almost the first complete research book on the biography of Joyce Mansour written in Arabic, her life, relationships, papers, and poetic and narrative works as well. “The reader may not know that Joyce’s narrative works exceeds her poetic works by many stages,” as the author explains.
This encyclopedic research thesis is a sequel to another work by El Belasy that has not yet been published, although he completed it first. It is a book that includes his translation of her unique and unknown creative prose works, which have never been published in Arabic before. Joyce Mansour was not only a wandering wonder, but her works are “poetically stimulating prophetic speculations, inscribed through the awareness of her haunted atmosphere,” as described by the American poet and critic Will Alexander.
She was a poet who wanted to walk silently at night, shedding the body of her past and traveling without bags to the sky, suffocated by disgust as the music of lanterns drowned around her. As for her tongue, that charming and elusive sorcerer, it never ceases to commit the full crimes of speech: boldness, solitude, eroticism, ugliness, fear, rebellion, escape, disobedience, and insane desires. It is a freedom of expression of the spirit, body, and diverse and troubled emotions. Yet, it remains pure with its pure techniques and exceptional aesthetics. “There is no point in singing hymns when lightning strikes a hollow tooth in the middle of the night. There is no point in carrying torches in the belly of the earth, where wild strawberries explode.”
The title of Mohsen Elbelasy’s book draws inspiration from the leading French surrealist poet André Breton (1896-1966), a friend of Joyce Mansour, who called her “Tuberose Baby girl “, referring to the rare Tuberose flower, with its aphrodisiac scent, which can be smelled two days after picking. Joyce became known by this distinctive nickname in Paris, alongside Breton’s other description of her as “the garden of delirium of this century.”
El belasy finds in Joyce Mansour an image of the eternal Eros, the immortal god of love, desire, and sex. Hence, the Tuberose Baby girl, in his opinion, “has not left, and will never leave.” El Belasy’s view of love, its gods, its hidden eternal power, and its relationship to life and poetry is also based on Breton’s saying in “Mad Love,” with which
El Belasy begins his book: “I do not deny that love has something to do with life, I say that it must invade and occupy. To reach victory, it must have risen to such a poetic awareness of itself that all hostile conflicts, which it inevitably encounters in the end, melt away in the heart of its glory.”
Mohsen El belasy argues that Joyce Mansour, who lived in Cairo’s Zamalek district as a young teenager, then a wife and young poet, was not spoiled by the surrealists, among whom she occupied a high position, only because of André Breton’s admiration for her. But before all that, and before her final trip to Paris in 1956, “she had caused a philosophical, poetic, and surrealist revolution, with its characteristics and its path, since her early adolescence in Cairo, where she suffered existential and social ruptures that disturbed her comfort as a descendant of a wealthy and stable family.”
Joyce Mansour was born in Bowden, England, to Egyptian Syrian Jewish parents in 1928, and moved to Cairo with her parents. Joyce contacted the Parisian surrealist movement while still living in Egypt. During that period she was married twice, the first in 1947, and her husband died after six months when she was only 19 years old. The second marriage was in 1949, and she divided her time with her husband Samir Mansour, from whom she took her well-known name, between Cairo and Paris, where Joyce had started writing in French.
Even if Joyce Mansour had not known André Breton, had not been part of the Parisian movement before, nor an official member of the Egyptian surrealist movement “art and Liberty group “, she, as Mohsen Elbelasy sees, felt an affinity with surrealism after the Egyptian surrealist writer and poet George Henein (1914-1973) introduced her to the first manifesto of surrealism and the avant-garde surrealist movement in Egypt. Then Joyce followed French surrealism and other new European movements from Cairo.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the surrealist sense began to take shape inside Joyce Mansour and a group of Egyptian poets who used to attend the French literary salons in Cairo and meet the inspiring surrealist George Henein, headed by the salon of Marie Cavadia, the Romanian writer and poet of Greek origin, who writes in French.
Thus, as El Belasy argues, we realize when reading Joyce Mansour’s works “the influences that she may have been exposed to in Marie Cavadia’s salon. The esoteric symbols in her first book at this time were familiar to her poetic vocabulary, as her vocabulary was interwoven with her erotic violence, where the lines of blood, sweat, and tears blend with the themes of love and death. She was greatly influenced by her constant attendance at this salon, her meetings with George Henein, and her continuous travels to France, before her final departure to Paris in 1956.”
Revealing Joyce Mansour’s Enigma:
Based on Joyce Mansour’s papers and interviews, Mohsen El-Belasy reveals that she didn’t meet André Breton until 1956. The meeting coincided with the publication of her third book, “Julius Caesar,” the same year she left Egypt. Before and after moving to Paris, Joyce became involved in the second wave of global surrealism. Breton and his companions sought to revitalize the movement after World War II.
Joyce’s poetry collections enriched surrealism with oriental rituals, Egyptian mythology, and Pharaonic civilization. Among her notable works are
– « Cris», Ed. Seghers, París, 1953
- « Déchirures», Les Éditions de Minuit, París, 1955
- « Rapaces», Ed. Seghers, París, 1960
- « Carré blanc», Le Soleil Noir, París, 1966
- « Les Damnations», Ed. Visat, París, 1967
- « Phallus et momies», Éd. Daily Bul, 1969
- « Astres et désastres», 1969
- « Anvil Flowers», 1970
- « Prédelle Alechinsky à la ligne», 1973
- « Pandemonium», 1976
- « Faire signe au machiniste», 1977
- « Sens interdits», 1979
- « Le Grand Jamais», 1981
- « Jasmin d’hiver», 1982
- « Flammes immobiles», 1985
- « Trous noirs», Ed. La pierre d’Alun, Bruxelles, 1986 (illustrated by fundamental Peruvian painter Gerardo Chávez)
- Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems, published by City Lights Books. 7/11/2023. ISBN 9780872869011.
Prose
- « Les Gisants satisfaits», Jean-Jacques Pauvert, París, 1958
- « Jules César», Éd. Pierre Seghers, París, 1956
- « Le Bleu des fonds», Le Soleil Noir, París, 1968
- « Ça», Le Soleil Noir, París, 1970
- « Histoires nocives», Gallimard, París, 1973
The Enigma and Interpretations:
El-Belasy approaches Joyce’s writings as an enigma open to multiple interpretations. He examines her life, literary and social relationships, and public and private biography from the same perspective. Throughout the book, he offers his insights and interpretations to illuminate the hidden aspects of one of the world’s most prominent surrealists. This is particularly important because Joyce has not received adequate scholarly attention in the Arab world, and has even been misrepresented in some conservative Arab cultural circles.
El-Blassi argues that for over 30 years, “Joyce Mansour was presented to the Middle East solely as an erotic poet. She was confined to that framework by a critical movement with rigid views. She was completely ignored as a short story writer, artist, and even a surrealist critic and thinker who played a radical and central role in shaping the history of the international surrealist movement from the 1950s to the 1980s.”
For the surrealists, eroticism is not synonymous with sensual carnality. It is “the embodiment of human desire, its deepest and most intimate, pure, transparent, and honest impulses. It is also a means of exploring a broader dimension of life and the human experience.”
The author finds that Joyce Mansour’s unique narrative style is a linguistic marvel without parallel. It is a “never-ending stream of stories, a distant black star with deep and impossible orbits.” Joyce produced this universal discourse because her voice is simply “the voice of a woman aware of the power of language as a means of resisting physical slavery in all its social forms.” Her narratives are full of vivid vignettes that capture the essence and depth of things, and they intersect lived reality with dreams, and moments of consciousness with absurd fantasy. Past, present, and future come together in a dramatic and fantastical tapestry that is difficult to grasp.
The author moves between different orbits in the chapters of his book, including Joyce Mansour’s life in Cairo, the rise of the Surrealist movement in Egypt, Joyce’s interest in Surrealism before she met André Breton, her move from Egypt to Paris, her integration into French society and the international Surrealist movement, her relationships with friends of the word and color, and the highlights of her creative and personal journey.
The research includes an Arabic bibliography of all her works and contributions, both in poetry and prose. It also includes a collection of introductions by the American poet and critic Will Alexander, the French academic Marc Kober, professor at the Sorbonne University, the French poet Laurent Doucet, the American poet Rikki Ducornet, and the American-Greek poet Georgia Pavlidou.
According to Mohsen Elbelasy, Joyce Mansour is directly, and perhaps unintentionally, responsible for intensifying the aura of mystery that surrounds her. He suggests in his interpretation that this ambiguity was created by her mixing talk about her early life with autobiographical elements that mostly stemmed from her poetic imagination rather than from actual reality. “She recreated her early life in her poems, the sensory and psychological spaces of her short story characters, and her own stories with her friends. She reveled in sowing confusion with humor to create a poetic past for herself, to write her own life and literary legend before her physical departure.”
According to Cyril, Joyce Mansour’s son, and his wife Professor Marie Mansour in her research, whom Elbelasy quotes, Joyce always wanted to deepen the mystery surrounding her. Hence, “she never corrected any fictional information, even among her friends, the literary autobiographical information that accompanied her writings, and the rumors that circulated about her stories.”
The text discusses the life and work of Joyce Mansour, a Surrealist poet and writer. The author argues that Mansour’s work is unique and powerful and that her use of language is a form of resistance to oppression. The text also explores the mystery surrounding Mansour’s life, and her deliberate cultivation of an aura of ambiguity.
The Book is full of many unknown correspondences and papers that have never been published in Arabic before, especially her correspondences with members of the Egyptian and international surrealist movement, during her stay in Cairo and after her departure to Paris. For example, a collection of letters sent to her by George Henein, in which he expresses his admiration for her works that were later published in her poetry collection “Screams”.
As for the correspondence exchanged between Joyce Mansour and André Breton, it refers to the existence of a special relationship between them, as Breton was “attracted to this magic coming from this strange young woman, and her predatory poetic talent”. The members of the Paris group noticed this special relationship between them, and Joyce began to become “the muse of the new surrealists”.
The first letter from André Breton to Joyce Mansour, as Mohsen Elbelasy reveals, was on March 1, 1954, before she settled in Paris, after reading her poetry book “Screams”. In this letter, Breton says “Suffice it to say that I read it in one sitting this morning and that I will reread it in small doses, sometimes, as needed. I was touched by these words, and by your writings that I was blessed to accompany. I only love the devil and you bring him back to life”.
Joyce Mansour drew inspiration for her second poetry collection “Tears” from those feelings towards André Breton, as Elbelasy says in his research book, and after the collection was published, she took it to him herself. The collection included a picture of André Breton and Joyce Mansour, while her dedication to him on his copy was as follows: “To André Breton, the black sorcerer who cannot be dissolved, to the person who never descended from the castle of stars!”.
The original article was published in Arabic in The Independent newspaper
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