Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

Which would you like, the personal Cleopatra or the political Cleopatra? I knew the personal one as a giggling teenager in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and in the movie by that name (Vivian Leigh, before she was Scarlett). I knew a mature, poetic Cleopatra from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Great fun, great drama, but certainly not one woman. “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety,” as the Bard said.

In Stacy Schiff’s biography of the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, I detect a political Cleopatra. A descendant of Ptolemy and the Macedonian Greeks who apportioned out his empire after the death of Alexander the Great, Cleopatra was the successful ruler of an independent Egypt for 20 years. The conniving and scheming of which she has stood convicted these many centuries were the maneuvers of a ruler trying to hold onto her own. She succeeded for a substantial period in this time of civil wars interspersed with wars of conquest which were a smash and grab for power and treasure. In the end she lost not just her life, but the independence of Egypt and any possible future for her children in the Ptolemaic dynasty.

This book gives us Rome as seen from the other side of the Mediterranean, a nation determined to build an empire which would not be a federation of kingdoms and cultures like Alexander’s, but a set of dependencies, controlled by Rome. Last year when I read the Aeneid, I was appalled by the glorification of Rome. Telling the story of Aeneas’ escape from Troy to found the future Rome, the first part is modeled on the Odyssey (a man returning home) and the second part on the Iliad (battle and conquest). Whereas the Greeks fought for personal glory and for treasure, the proto-Romans under Aeneas fought to establish an empire which was still supposedly centuries in the future. All the mayhem was justified because Rome would bring peace and prosperity to all.

Cleopatra’s story and Cleopatra’s fate tell us something else. Schiff says,

If you were looking for a date for the beginning of the modern world, her [Cleopatra's] death would be the best to fix upon. With her she took both the four-hundred-year-old Roman Republic and the Hellenistic Age. Octavian would go on to effect one of the greatest bait and switches in history; he restored the Republic in all its glory and — as would be apparent within a decade or so — as  a monarchy.

God Dies by the Nile

I wanted to like this book, one of the books for discussion at Feminist Classics, but I just couldn’t warm to it. In this novel Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi depicts the miseries of peasant life. The focus is on Zakeya and her brother and is set within the confines of a peasant village. The contrast is strong between the lives of the workers and the powerful. The powerful are the Mayor and the Chief of the Village Guard and, sometimes, but not secure in their positions, the Sheikh and the local barber.

I found the language of the book unappealing. This is a translation, so perhaps what seems stilted and repetitious in English is poetic in Arabic. The burning disk of the sun makes too many appearances. Certain adjectives grate on the understanding. Zakeya’s face is described as “bloodless” (pale?) and only a few sentences later the face of the buffalo is also bloodless, a confusing image. There may be a sense of the original Arabic word which relates the face of the woman and the face of the buffalo better than the English equivalent does. Time shifts are sudden and unexplained and some references to he or she are unclear.

I find this novel more of a protest against the injustice of Egyptian society than a feminist tract. There is not much to choose between the abuse of men and women in the story; each is abused in accordance with his or her gender. Men are murdered and falsely accused of murder. Women are deceived and seduced and cast out. Being male does not save the “son of fornication and sin” from death at the hands of the mob.

The tone of the book reminds me of some of the early novels of Pearl Buck, like The Good Earth. An educated woman who has lived in the culture (Pearl Buck grew up in China, the daughter of missionaries) tries to depict the lives of people she perceives as abused. Because she has observed the peasant class but is not one of them, her interpretation of their thought processes is somewhat simplistic.

The powerful in the village think the people are unable to understand their situation:

The Chief of the Village Guard hastened to refute this possibility. ‘No, absolutely not. Suspicion requires that a man be endowed with a brain that can think. But these peasants! They have no brain, and when they do have one, it’s like the brain of a buffalo.

The author does little to show that she thinks the peasants understand matters any more than the Chief does. The villagers know who is good and who is bad and do not trust authority, but theirs is not a reasoned reaction.

Instinctively they felt that Kafrawi was not a killer, or a criminal. They hated the policeman and his dogs, hated all policemen, all officers, all representatives of authority and the government. It was the hidden ancient hatred of peasants for their government.

The hatred is hidden, for they are obsequious when confronted by authority, superstitious and violent when aroused.

Finally, the title God Dies by the Nile conveys that, although the people constantly evoke Allah, it is the mayor who controls their lives. The Sheikh says,

They don’t have faith in God nor do they worry their heads about what will happen either in this world, or in the next. In their hearts they don’t fear God. What they really fear is the Mayor. He holds their daily bread in his hands and if we wants, he can deprive them of it.

Allah is eternal. They Mayor can die by the Nile.

Naguib Mahfouz, Wedding Song

If you have never read any Mahfouz, do not begin with this book. Instead, pick up Palace Walk, the first book of his Cairo Trilogy, written in the 1950s, and submerge yourself in the interior of family life in that Egyptian city.

Mahfouz is sometimes said to have invented the Arabic novel, and it is reported that he started by emulating Sir Walter Scott. By the time of Palace Walk he was modeling his novels on the Great Victorians. Although he is often compared with Dickens because of his range of characters, I think he is more like Trollope. Whereas Dickens openly judged the people he created, Trollope let them speak for themselves, as does Mahfouz when he depicts the patriarchal head of the household in Palace Walk. Yes, he is a hypocritical rascal, but you end of liking him just a little.

The characters in Wedding Song came into being a generation later, and Mahfouz has moved on his in fictional experiments. Here he is taking the Rashoman approach, as four related characters each speaks in his or own voice, relating the same incidents, even the same dialog. I found it difficult to absorb myself in their lives. Part of the difficulty was external: the unfamiliar names and locations, the confusing blending of past and present. The other difficulty was internal: how sincere were the speakers? Do they tell the truth about their feelings or are they trying to to impress us?

The last to speak is Abbas, the young writer of a successful play. He relates the events he imagines for his play to the life on which his play was based.

In reality the house had been raided by police and sickness had killed Tahiya and her son, but there was another murderer: my imagination, which had informed the police and had killed both Tahiya and the baby, and was thus the ultimate protagonist in a plot that fulfilled all the requirements of a drama — a plot through which I would confess, do penance and write a real play for the first time.

Isn’t this what playwrights do? They take what they know and imagine a drama from it. In Abbas, however, this use of the imagination makes him a murderer, someone who must do penance.