The humane side of Naguib Mahfouz |
|
Collection title
Letters and authors
Source
Bibliotheca Alexandrina (EG)
First broadcast date
02/01/2007
Abstract
The fifth edition of the Bibliotheca Alexandria international exhibition of books hosts the writer Mohamed Selmaoui. He will sign the book " Naguib Mahfoud : the terminal "at a symposium. In this book, he deals with Naguib Mahfoud's life.
Production companies
-
Library of Alexandria - Own production
Broadcaster
Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Audiovisual form
Conference
Primary theme
Languages and literatures
Credits / Cast
- Selmaoui Mohamed - Participant
Map locations
- Egypt - Lower Egypt - Alexandria
Context
The human side of Naguib Mahfouz
Richard Jacquemond
A few months after Naguib Mahfouz's death, on August 30th 2006, the Bibliotecha Alexandrina arranged a tribute to the great author. The writer Mohamed Salmawy brought back memories of the man by telling a few stories about his life. In 1971, when Mahfouz was 60 and had just retired as a civil servant, he took a job on the major Egyptian daily Al-Ahram as a leader-writer, a status which the paper (and behind it the regime) only gave to the country's major intellectual figures. Mohamed Salmawy, then a young graduate in English literature, began his career at almost the same time on the same paper, at the same time writing his first novels, which he asked the Master to read. In 1988 Mahfouz asked Salmawy to take his place in Stockholm to read his Nobel acceptance speech, first in Arabic then in English. After the assassination attempt on him in 1994 (see the context for the archival film "Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian people and civilisation" INA00058) Mahfouz was no longer able to write his weekly column for Al-Ahram, which then took on the form of an interview with Mohamed Salmawy. The latter, despite the many demands of his career (in 1993 he founded Al-Ahram Hebdo in French, a weekly paper he ran until 2010, and in 2005 he was elected General Secretary of the Union of Egyptian Writers) remained close to Mahfouz up until the end. He talked here with great feeling of his visits to the hospital where Mahfouz was to die after 45 days in a coma (read Naguib Mahfouz, le dernier train).
All his life Mahfouz had many friends in Egytpian literary and intellectual circles, where sociability is very important. He held different salons where close friends and contemporaries met, joined by younger writers as the years went by. His good nature and his open mind became almost as proverbial as his disciplined life and his wit, sometimes at the expense of his contemporaries (read the interviews with Gamal Ghitany and Ragâ’ al-Naqqâch). The portrait Mohamed Salmawy gives here is of a piece with that image, tending to fix the man as a genius (a word often repeated by Salmawy) who nevertheless remained modest-and-human-right-to-the-end. That view was emphasised even more since the man's death was still recent when this clip was made. The fact is that this somewhat hagiographic picture of Mahfouz was imposed on him during his lifetime, the Nobel Prize having made him a true national hero as from 1988, for whom the 1994 assassination attempt added the aura of martyr. At his death, the regime decided to give him a state funeral: behind the coffin, drapped in the national flag, President Mubarak and a handful of dignitaries in ceremonial dress – while thousands of ordinary people wanting to join the procession were kept at a distance by police cordons. A lover of nokat (jokes), Mahfouz would have liked the one going round at the time: "Who officates at Naguib Mahfouz' funeral? The thief and the dogs." (The Thief and the Dogs (1989) being one of his best-known novels).
Bibliography:
Mahfouz par Mahfouz : entretiens avec Gamal Ghitany, trad. Khaled Osman, Paris, Sindbad, 1995
Naguib Mahfouz, Pages de mémoires. Entretiens avec Ragâ’ al-Naqqâch, traduite par Marie Francis-Saad, Arles, Actes Sud/Sindbad, 2007
Mohamed Salmawy, Naguib Mahfouz, le dernier train, trad. Mona Latif-Ghattas, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2009