تغريدة البجعة by مكاوي سعيد

 
I totally understand M. Lynx Qualey's dislike of this book and I was especially struck by her comment that it has "some fairly bizarrely portrayed women." This is a book about a selfish man who has several different careless and annoyed relationships with women, none of which he respects except for the idealized phantom of a girl who died (in the gruesome way you'd expect someone to die in a lazy plot twist) before the book begins. What's more, he is always wavering at some stage between envy, annoyance, or pity for his male friends. He is a failed leftist, failed poet, failed ex-pat. It's all a big bummer and it doesn't really go anywhere or say anything.
But I still thought it was a totally admirable book for its honesty. I watched an interview with Makawi Said and I was surprised at his appearance. I was expecting someone much closer to their 30s. But he was born in 1955. The narrator Mustafa in the book, then, seems to be a very accurate mimicking of the short-tempered younger generation of people more like me who've never had the benefit of being able to look back longingly for the old revolutionary or modernist days. How much more disheartening would it be as an Egyptian if you were never alive for the once-upon-a-time optimism of Nasserism. Arabic literature is crowded out by the old guard of communists like Sonallah Ibrahim and Saadi Youssef, and from the massive chorus of those whose literary careers seems to be meant only to lament the Nakba.
There is no sense of a lost past for Mustafa, he is a voice of the doldrums of Capitalist realism. And maybe that's why this book has been popular with young people. I felt embarrassingly empathetic for Mustafa. And beyond recognizing some of his selfish thoughts in myself, I could recognize his outlook from the men I met when I was in Egypt. And in trying to use a journal-style unedited narrative, Makkawi Said in a way isn't meant to be called to task for the TON of sexist, racist, reductionist, whiny, and illogical things that Mustafa says. That's the way a dude living in nihilist decay thinks. I myself read the passage about Americans saying that we think like computers and name our streets using numbers like ahistorical robots with a good deal of eye-rolling. But that's the kind of messy analogy a person in a bad mood would come up with. Don't get me wrong, there are lot of other really bad analogies, like, you wince they're so trite (and the sections I've read from the Adam Talib translation seem only to make matters worse). But at the heart of the novel, and what I think makes it worthwhile, is that it so accurately speaks as the voice of the aimless claustrophobic ex-pat socializing Egyptian man.