Handout 6 English 193 Naguib Mahfouz
(1911-2006) ,W. B.Yeats(1865-1939)
and M.Darwish
( 19-
1.
Mahfouz’s The trilogy — which includes Palace Walk (1956),
Palace of Desire (1957) and Sugar Street (1957) — remained one of Mahfouz’s best loved works — even to him. Mahfouz says: “I
wrote the trilogy when I was at my peak,” Mahfouz
told El-Ghitani. “I was patient, thorough. A work
like this needs patience, you need to be healthy. If you see the Trilogy
archives, you would understand what I mean. Each character had his or her own
file, so I would not forget features and description Then
there was the planning for the novel as a whole, so it would be a concrete
building. I have a lot of papers and notebooks which I wrote in a period of
four years, thoroughly, quietly, moved by the need to finish something good. My
struggle with the language had not yet started, so I wrote it peacefully,” he
says.
Indeed,
the author admits to having invested his own personality in one of the
trilogy’s characters: Kamal Abdel
Gawwad, the youngest son in El-Sayyed
Abdel Gawwad family. “Some
people believe that the Trilogy is based on my personal life and that Kamal Abdel Gawwad
was a reflection of myself,” Mahfouz
once told his friend Salmawy. “This is not true. The
Trilogy is a panorama of an entire society. Still, Kamal’s
character mirrors mine in certain ways, especially in the intellectual sense:
in the dilemmas he faced over such matters as Western and Oriental cultures,
faith, and European philosophy.
“A
part of me is in the trilogy, in the character of Kamal
Abdel Gawwad,” the author
later told El-Ghitani. “But Kamal
did not just pop into the trilogy, and did not get there because he is part of
me. He appeared because he was an indispensable part of the essence of the
novel. The novel comes from the Classical age, delves into the Romantic age,
and heads towards the Analytic age. You find East and West in it, but not
through the journey of Tawfik El-Hakim, or Yehia Haqqi, or El-Tayyeb Saleh. It represents he
who found the West while living in the East. The manifestations of civilization
had come to him, and these psychological, spiritual and mental changes had to
be explained. I had struggled through this,” Mahfouz
says.
2.The
Ahmad Abd al-Jawad said to Amina “All I ask of you is to obey me.
Don’t force me to discipline you” (8), a tone for patriarchal
. (3) He “demanded blind
obedience from his sons” and angrily reminded his son Kamal
that “manners are better than learning” (24). Ironically, his children “could
not imagine that any other man in the world could equal [their father’s] power,
dignity, or wealth.” Additionally, “everyone in the household
loved the man to the point of worship [although for his son Kamal,
the youngest,] that love remained a hidden jewel, locked up inside him by fear
and terror” (55).
Oppression
is introduced into The Cairo Trilogy through the character of Amina,
who serves her husband, Mr. al-Sayyid Ahmad with an obedience unmatched in contemporary Western or Arab
Islamic families. Early in her marriage, Amina is
“engulfed in darkness” which parallels the right alley in front of her house.
Night after night she is left alone “reciting the Qur’an
suras” so that she can “ward off demons” of her
imagination because she “remained convinced that she was not alone in the big
house” (7). Her mother’s only consolation to Amina is
that “he married you after divorcing his first wife” and “he could have kept
her too, if he’d wanted, or taken second, third, and fourth wives . . . Thank
our Lord that you remain his only wife” (10). Both Amina
and her mother are products of a culture that places the female secondary to
the male’s domineering position in the family. In contrast to a Western feminist
perspective
that sees Amina
as being repressed and stifled by the authoritative male, based on the status
of the male being superior to the female, the Islamic feminist, who is
pro-family, would argue that Amina is oppressed as a
result of a misrepresentation of the Qur’anic
framework that in reality calls for equality for both men and women. True Islam requires men to honor women. Margot Badran argues that Islamic
feminist discourse 4 “demonstrates common concerns and goals, starting with the
basic affirmation of
gender
equality and social justice” (1).
Kamal, a student of philosophy in the
Mahfouz, Naguib. The
William
Politics
`In our time the
destiny of man presents its meanings in What Was Lost
I SING what was lost and dread what was won, |
The Dolls
A DOLL in the
doll-makers house |
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Mahmoud Darwish (1941-) محمود
درويش;( born in Al-Birwah, British Mandate of Palestine) Identity Card (1964)
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