Breaking Taboos Is Not Enough

Ibrahim Farghali is one of six authors from the Arab world invited by the Goethe Institute to work as city chronicler in Germany. In his portrait, Frederik Richter talked with him about Hermann Hesse, Günther Grass and censorship in Egypt.

Ibrahim Farghali was just 24 years old when as a fledgling journalist he interviewed Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz. His yearning for literature had become so overpowering that, just one year after completing his unloved course of studies in his small hometown of Mansoura, he moved to the big city of Cairo.

Today, in addition to his job as critic for the state-owned daily paper Al-Ahram, Farghali is also a writer himself – and he needs every bit of his passion for literature to contend with the difficulties faced by a young author in an Arab country. Farghali, now 37 years old, developed his literary leanings at an early age.

Keeping the distance from literary circles

He grew up in the gulf nations of Oman and Dubai, where his father had found work. Farghali had a hard time making friends with his classmates at school, so he immersed himself instead in the world of literature. He wrote his first poems at age 14.

Even today, he still keeps his distance from the circles of intellectuals and writers that regularly meet in the cafés of downtown Cairo to discuss current political and cultural affairs. It's all just a bunch of gossip, Farghali says. He claims that not one good idea for his books ever came out of his participation in such conversations.

In his works to date, Ibrahim Farghali has explored a variety of themes. In the short-story collection "The Ghosts of Feelings" he attempts to explore the relationship between Egyptian men and women, who come from utterly disparate backgrounds. Again and again, he tells the same story, but from a different perspective. By doing so, Farghali is trying to demonstrate how limited our understanding of people really is.

Since he had never been to Germany, Farghali knew Stuttgart only from photos and from reading up on the city's history on its homepage. That's all he wanted to know ahead of time, so he could keep an open mind and just let the city have its effect on him.

But he nevertheless thinks it must be very difficult to be forced to write something every day. He wants to do things differently from his colleague José Olivier, who as official city chronicler of Cairo compiled his impressions of the city in the form of fleeting scraps of text. Cairo was hardly recognizable in these text fragments, in Farghali's view, which is why in Stuttgart he intends to use a mixture of journalistic and literary style.

"The Glass Bead Game" and contemporary Egypt

During this stay in Germany, Ibrahim Farghali would definitely like to visit the house where Hermann Hesse lived. That author's style and timelessness were what impressed him most of all in German literature. He has read "The Glass Bead Game" over and over again, a book that for him perfectly captures what it's like to be in Egypt today.

By contrast, he finds that Günter Grass' style and historical themes are no longer of contemporary pertinence.

German literature has not made many inroads into Egypt thus far. Because of the country's colonial history, primarily French and English literature has been translated into Arabic. With his visit to Germany, Farghali hopes to finally learn something about the youngest generation of German writers.

Breaking taboos is not enough

In Egypt Farghali himself is part of this generation. But on the Arabic literary scene, which is shaped by strict hierarchies, new voices have a hard time being heard. Especially when, like Farghali, they abstain from running roughshod over Egyptian society's moral and religious taboos in order to attract attention to themselves.

Farghali by contrast dwells in the realm of quiet tones – and does so without compromise. A state-run publisher demanded that he remove all sexual overtones from his manuscript for "The Ghosts of Feelings" before publishing it. But since that was out of the question for Farghali, he has no choice but to put up with the vagaries and lack of professionalism of the few remaining independent Egyptian literary publishers.

Ibrahim Farghali has published two novels and two short-story collections so far, but has yet to earn even one Egyptian pound for them. It's also up to him to see that his books get distributed – and they are therefore hard to come by anywhere outside the few bookshops in downtown Cairo.

Frederik Richter

Translation from German: Jennifer Taylor-Gaida