Mohsen Elbelasy
A doorway opens into the labyrinthine mind of Joyce Mansour. Step into a realm of shadowed desires and luminous prose. Within this digital exhibition, previously unseen photographs whisper secrets, letters unveil the poet’s soul, and documents trace the arc of her extraordinary life. This immersive experience marks the momentous publication of “Joyce Mansour / The Tuberose Baby Girl” by Mohsen Elbelasy and “Hurtful Stories / The Complete Prose Texts of Joyce Mansour”. Witness the fusion of Mohsen Elbelasy’s meticulous translations with Ghadah Kamal’s haunting visual interpretations.
Soon the artworks of the book (Hurtful stories)
Fiom bby Mohsen Elbelasy /Joyce please back to cairo
Mohsen Elbelasy says :
First, before talking about my books about Joyce Mansour, I must clarify that they are two books, not one book
The first is
– Joyce Mansour /The Tuberose baby girl
critical research /critical life story
By Mohsen Elbelasy through Sefsafa Publishing house
The book is the first book in Arabic that deals with the life journey of Joyce Mansour, in a comprehensive and ramified manner.
The second book is :
-Hurtful stories /The Complete Prose texts of Joyce Mansour in Arabic
Translated by /Mohsen L Belasy
Artworks by: Ghadah Kamal
Through Al Mutawaset Publishing house
The second book will be published next month
My fascination with Joyce Mansour, but also with Surrealist women in general, began with an urgency on my mind since my participation in the Egyptian Revolution. I realized the extreme revolutionary and social power of Surrealist women and the social impact they had in both oppressive societies and isolated societies.
In such societies restrictions are imposed on human sexuality as society represses our basics drives apart from socially acceptable procreation.
The liberation of Eros will act as a fatal force to all existing rot, something like a complete denial of the principle that governs everyday reality.
I remember the words of Penelope Rosemont from her book The Surrealist Woman, which motivated me to delve into Joyce’s life more and more:
For women, the primary rebellion tends to be sexual, because sexuality is the aspect of their behavior most exposed to societal and patriarchal control.
The book, as it digs into the biography of Joyce Mansour’s life and works, also digs into the development of the progressive cultural movement in Egypt from the end of the twenties until the moment of Joyce Mansour’s departure to Paris in the mid-fifties.
Evoking the power of Joyce Mansour now in the Arabic language is a challenge to every oppressor of women or the oppressor of the human body or desire in the Middle East after the period of social earthquakes here in the region in the last ten years.
A slap in the face of religious, social, and male oppression
I called on Joyce to come to this era to expose the socially repressive doctrines that emerged in Egypt after the revolution, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Salafists, who prevented the free expression of human motives. I wanted to restore the respect for desire in an open, naked, and untainted way, in the direction of a positive glorification of the body in a , funny way , and altruistic way. Or sometimes in a dark way as it exists in the subconscious.
While researching and exploring Joyce Mansour’s life and works, the Arab reader was always my goal…
When reading Joyce Mansour or contemplating her life and rebellious ideas, the reader must completely change himself and his consciousness by getting rid of thier reading habits,. In this game, I incite the readers to reinvent thier inner desires, open all thier senses to understand a new beauty, and build a completely new imagination for them thus implicating them in a surrealist game whose area is the life of Joyce Mansour.
It is therefore up to the readers to overcome a mysterious aspect of their inner desires on the condition that they accepts to play the game that separates them from their reality.
Bringing Joyce Mansour and her works to the Arab reader at this moment arouses within them the horror of everything that suppresses desire, whatever form this desire takes, without the burden of any restrictions. Specifically, by unleashing their hidden behaviors by exceeding the so-called reasonable limits of everyday reality.
We can understand Joyce Mansoor through the dual bi lingual character that combines characteristics of binationalism, bilingualism, and bisexuality.
Joyce has said that her works are largely autobiographical work
Joyce recreates her early life in her poems, the sensual and psychological spaces of the characters in her short stories, and her private stories with her friends. She was excited by spreading confusion with humor, creating a poetic past for herself, to writing her life and literary legend before her physical departure.
Although Joyce was preoccupied with the idea of death, she wasted no time questioning the meaning of life: all of her writing is oriented toward liberation toward what is in life, wanting every written gesture to explode into a challenge against death, to establish a space where the evil souls that satisfied with surrendering to the suppression of desire.
On the other hand, we find death and desire facing each other, and she knows very well with great sadness that in the end, it is death that will win. Joyce accepts death, but only on her terms. She draws inspiration from erotic poetic images as weapons to liberate her inner fears and takes the reader to a world full of images that carry magic.
Joyce Mansour is a poet whose metaphorical images emerge from her private subconscious. She sometimes invokes ancient Egypt, its myths, and death together in the context of dramatic and violent confrontations with all suppressors of desire. She seeks death and at the same time seeks to kill it.
The universe evoked in Joyce Mansour’s writings is a world in which there is no God. This explains the absence of the idea of feeling sinful. She grew up in an environment in Cairo, where religion was not talked about, where words like redemption and sacrifice had no meaning. Therefore, she uses language devoid of any religion . In this process of exorcism of metaphysics, writing is inherent in freedom, the freedom to copy what extends on the other side of the boundaries of the rational thinking . Far from thinking about the external world, Joyce Mansour devotes herself to examining her inner state. She transforms her everyday and familiar world into something “unexpected,” “unimaginable.” Joyce Mansour’s poetic fury is the engine of this transformation.
Joyce Mansour created her vision of Surrealism, without imitating her male Surrealist friends who always supported her in her “poetic fury.”
Also for the other book, my translation of the complete prose works and short stories by Joyce Mansour, with Ghada Kamal’s illustrations. The Arabs were not aware that Joyce Mansour had written prose and short stories. Only some simple translations of her poems, it was a surprise to the Egyptians and Arab readers.
For many years, I found it strange that she was presented to the Arab reader as only an erotic poet of Jewish origins, who lived her childhood in Egypt and belong to Egypt as she wanted . Many people who have read translations of a few of her poems into Arabic do not know that she had very important experiences in writing surrealist short stories, and she published unique collections of short stories and prose texts in five books.
The narrative nature of her sentences can be described as consisting of psychological units that pre-exist in our psychological interior, but they take on a new meaning and existence and new mutual relationships with a dreamy panorama that takes shape in the reader’s imagination. This is not far from the concept of surrealist visual collage.
The entire archive belongs to the Joyce Mansour family
SULFUR 