Tarek Eltayeb – Cities without Palms And Other Writings 1/2

For many years Tayib Salih, author of the memorable "Season of Migration to the North" published in 1967, dominated Sudanese literature. In the last decade, however, two authors have appeared on the literary scene, Leila Aboulela, the award – winning novelist who wrote "The Minaret" and - Tarek Eltayeb.

His first novel "Mudun Bila Nakhil" – Cities without Palms – was originally written in Arabic in 1992. Its English translation by Kareem James Palmer – Zeid has just been published by the American University in Cairo.

 "Cities without Palms" is the story of young man, Hamza, who decided to leave his native village, Wadi Al-Nar, in order to provide for his mother and young sisters. His odyssey takes him first to neighboring Egypt and then Europe

It is a story of freedom, creativity, nostalgia – and hope. It also reminds of the author’s own life, interview

Q: You were born in Cairo, in Egypt. How do you remember the Cairo of your childhood?
Tarek: The Cairo of my childhood is the Cairo of sixties and for me as a child - a great time. I lived at different places, first in one of the older parts of Cairo, named Al-Bayyoumi. We then moved to Ain Shams, which in those days used to be a village in the vicinity of the desert. I remember Ain Shams with green fields and farmers.

Should you visit it today, you can not understand what am saying as it has changed so much.  I grew up between yellow color in the north east and the green color in the north. With my family, we used to spent great summers in Al-Arish on the Mediterranean sea in northern Sinai on the beach with all those wonderful palms - all up to 1967, when we lost our small house there.

My childhood was without TV, but we used to listen to radio and I was fascinated by the stories that my mother, grandmother or great – grandmother used to tell. I like to remember my first visits to the cinema with my mother. We used to watch films with Farid El-Atrash, Abdelhalim Hafez, Rushdi Abaza, Faten Hamama and many others.

Q: Your parents were Sudanese, how do you remember Sudan, and what does Sudan mean to you?
Tarek: My father was born and grew up in Sudan and he came to Cairo beginning of fifties. My mother, grandma and great - grandma were all born in Egypt. My father in particular used to be attached to country of his birth. He used to travel at least once a year to Sudan and spend there at least five weeks prior his retirement.

As he traveled in summer, we children, did not find it attractive to join him. But once at the age of 20 I did go with him and we both had a wonderful journey. First by train to Aswan and then by ship to Wadi Halfa and then by train to Al-Khartoum.

Sudan always played a great role in our lives in Cairo. We used to hear many stories from my father and relatives which came to visit or stay with us for a day, two month or longer, always without prior announcement.  There was Sudanese food in our home as well as Egyptian.

Ain Shams (the City of the Sun) used to be a favorite place to settle for Sudanese community. The Sudanese colloquial language was all around us, and music, Sudanese songs, traditions and feasts, weddings, funerals - mixed with the Egyptian dialect, kitchen, music and Egyptian traditions.

Q: What is was like to be growing up as a Sudanese in Cairo, favorite places, friends…?
Tarek: As a child one does not consider oneself as foreigner in any country. The place one born, this is your place. And nobody can take this from you head, or memory or soul. My favorite places will always be the small streets and alleys of old Cairo, Ain Shams in the sixties and seventies and Al-Arish with its wonderful beach and nature.

In my childhood there was no real difference between Sudanese and Egyptian people, either socially or politically. But there was a change in eighties and suddenly, we Sudanese were considered foreigners.

But as long as I lived in Egypt, I had many friends of different nationalities and religions.

Q: First writings and artistic expression…?
Tarek: My interest in art and expression began early, at the age of 7 or 8 maybe. I was fascinated by calligraphy, caricature and painting. I painted on the walls of our house, from the up to bottom – and there are still traces of it today. My parents, of course, were less happy with this kind of art.

Also I was interesting in Arabic language and started early to imitate my father in reading. My father had a selection of literature at home and liked to read. My first experiments in writing poetry were at the age of seventeen. I was trying to express my feelings, when I fell for first time in love.

But it was in Vienna that I begun to write literature seriously. I was 26 and the year was 1985.

Q: Your live seems to envelop around places with big rivers -the Nile, Danube.  What role – if any- these rivers play in your life, and how did they shape you?
Tarek: I was born in Egypt by accident and I also moved to Austria accidentally. I have spent my life close to Nile and the Danube. And of course, those rivers are part of my life, have left impressions and play and important part in my writings and other artistic expressions.

Q: You then entered "your season of migrating to the north" to Austria, why to Austria, first encounters with "otherness"
Tarek: After my graduation from university I faced frustrating time. Suddenly, we Sudanese, found ourselves foreigners in Egypt and I should pay a rather high fee in order to continue my studies at university.

I had to discontinue my studying for my Masters degree and found a job in a small auditing office in Cairo. I earned - at that time - only 30 Egyptian pounds per month (about 20 US dollars in that time). This salary was not enough even for transport. The job I was doing was rather silly. It did not require a university degree to collect bills, sorting them according to dates and then according to amounts. There was no challenge, nor anything to learn.

Then after few months, I decided to try my chance in another Arab country. The only country that was open at that time (1981) without visa was Iraq. This proved another bad experience. I had a restaurant in the north of the country, in Erbil. It turned out to be a rather dangerous place and I nearly lost my life. I decided to returnto Cairo and fled via north of Iraq first to Turkey, from there to Cairo. Thus the money I had "saved" from the whole journey was 10 dollars with which I took the taxi from the airport to our home.

I did not see a good chance for me in Egypt and I decided to leave Egypt for Europe in order to continue with my studies there. I did not want to go to London or Paris - like most of my friends did. I wanted to start a "real" new life, maybe in Scandinavia or Germany. I sent letters to universities in Germany enquiring about the possibilities for studying there. And then I then found out that I could study in Austria for free, an offer to students from underdeveloped country.

I made my decision; it turned out to be another long journey inside Austria, facing not so much the culture shock, but the language shock (German) and the weather shock as I arrived in Vienna in January.  

Q: In your beautiful poem "Broken Shadow" written in Vienna, you say "my shadow remained broken, though the path did run straight now", can you elaborate?
Tarek: The meaning here is reference to the past, to the invisible memory that we all carry inside us - all the time. For some it could be a hard burden, for others it might be easier. There is a proverb in German that "you cannot jump over your shadow." There were some breaking lines, some corners - dark or bright – on the path of these memories. As a writer one should not make a straight line out of them or gloss over them.

"The Broken Shadow" is not meant to be negative. It is characteristic features of our life - we all have to deal or better – live with it.
 
Q: What was the inspiration for "Cities without Palms" and which cities without palms are explored here?
Tarek: The inspiration is simply all those young people one meets in the countries in which I was born, young people  without HOPE. No good education, no health facilities, no future, just fighting for survival, getting no support from the governments, growing up in a world of poverty, hopelessness and corruption.

To be continued

BOOK REFERENCE
Cities without Palms by Tarek Eltayeb
The American University in Cairo Press
Hardback, 90 pages

FROM REVIEWS: 
Once started it is difficult to put down. It is sensational, original, and altogether a magnificent literary debut.
James Kirkup, Banipal

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Novelist, fiction writer, poet, playwright living and working in Austria. Born of Sudanese parents in Cairo, Egypt, in 1959, Tarek studied Business Administration at Ain Shams University in Cairo and Social Sciences and Economics at the Wirtschafts University in Vienna, Austria. He is teaching at the International Management Center in Krems, Lower Austria and also working as translator and interpreter for Arabic.

Tarek Eltayeb begun to write in 1985. His writings include contributions to Arabic newspapers and magazines both in Europe and in Arab countries and since 1992 several books in Arabic.

Awards include the Elias Cannetti Fellowship from the City of Vienna and four Major Project Fellowships for Literature, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2010, and International Grand Prize for Poetry at the International Festival Curtea des Arges in Rumania.

EXCERPTS FROM TAREK`S OTHER WRITINGS

Three Second Fall
I am falling.
And time saves its wasting of life on a weariness such as mine; my curiosity to reach the end has pre-dated my fall. These moments loosen the density of recollection tied up in my memory, bringing me back to an early memory, that I may begin another, new life. I am certain that there is a place for me somewhere, in some unknown place. I waver between accelerating and slackening the pace of my fall, drawn down though I am by the thread of fate. All my life I have thought that the thread of fate would draw me upwards and I wonder if it has, in fact, drawn me upward, without my realising.

Now I think of, or rather see, my wife, pregnant after years with our first child. Our first joy. Her solace in exile and her renewal of hope. I see her tears the day he was lost from this life. The inflection in her voice rings out loud in the dark emptiness.

"Bury him here," she is saying. "I want to visit him every day, to place a pebble cleansed with tears on his grave, a pebble for every day until I go to meet him." I hear his words when he was seven, saying,

"The clouds are bigger than the sky. If they weren't how could he hide the sky from us with the palms of their great hands whenever he wants?" At the time I was surprised by his words. It is only now, as I fall, that I understand exactly what he meant. He is saying, "If I die, do not bury me in this earth, for I still do not understand the language of these people, so I will never understand the language of the people of the tombs."

I am still falling.

I think of and see my brother visiting me after twenty-one years during the course of which we have not met. I laugh at the way his appearance has changed. I left him - when I left everything - as a young adolescent. And now he carries a large pot belly before him which quivers whenever he laughs about the soft white threads of time among the lines of my hair. I ask him how home is and the people. He falls silent. He changes the subject, and then he laughs and his pot belly is still.

I eat some of what my mother has sent: stuffed vine leaves and qulqaas ; and the sweet pastries, luqmat-il-qadi . The poor old thing still remembers my early letters, complaining of this place's wanting of her home made food. I doubt that the food my brother has brought is the work of her hand. In fact I doubt whether she is even alive. My brother swears that it is from her, he placates me. I swallow my bitterness, and tell him by way of excuse, "Ohh! Everything tastes different in exile."
My falling, continues.

I remember the news of my grandmother's death which reached me two years late. They lied to me for two whole years. They sent me old photographs. They loaded her with false history. "I will not let you go far from me," my grandmother is telling me before I leave.

Then they carried her with me to the airport, so that she could scatter the rest of her tears along the road. As though she knew that this was the path of no return. She died without knowing why. When I said, "I'll come back soon," I was lying to her. Her waiting grew longer and my waiting grew longer. And the meeting was postponed. Now I see her face, smiling at me with the same reassuring smile that she used to give me when I was a little boy. But now she is the same age that I was then. A little girl. I don't understand. I forget and hurry to hug her to me.
I accelerate, in my falling.

I remember many things. They come faster than thought. I remember the religion teacher when he beat me. I remember the day when I was chased away from the big house. I remember the day of my circumcision. I remember cold years outside the house. I remember this face, that place, the other thing whose name I have now forgotten. I remember. I forget.

From "A Camel Does Not Stop In Red", short stories, Al-Hadara Publishing House, Cairo 1993

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