Aam Al-Tenin (Year of the Dragon) by Mohamed Rabea, Cairo: Al Kotob Khan, 2012. 278pp.
"Proving yourself dead" is the challenge Mohamed Rabea drags his readers into for the duration of the 200+ pages of his latest book. Far from simple questions, the poor character at hand has to suffer through life and eventually depart before his fate decides.
Mohamed Rabea's latest novel, Year of the Dragon, delves into the life of Naim Abu Sabaa, an average struggling worker, husband of a troublesome woman who is constantly in search for money. He finds himself in a position where he struggles to prove that he's dead so his family gets his insurance policy.
Naim's trip through the labyrinths of the Egyptian state bureaucracy are only the background against which Rabea weaves the entire struggle of Egyptian life, history and politics.
The theme of bureaucracy and the parallel character lines meeting in the end are reminiscent of Rabea's first award-winning novel, Kawkab Anbar (Anbar's Planet) that won the Sawiris Cultural Award 2012. However, far from the fantasy world attempted in his first work, this time Rabea settles for a solid realistic ground, travelling only in few passages above reality, but staying close to it all throughout.
The story this time is split along two distinctive reading lines: one is Naim Abu Sabaa's life and events, and the other is an anonymous set of letters to the ousted president Mubarak in which the writer uses all his knowledge to advise him on the best way to rule.
"The book is designed to read like a blog," Reabea explained during a book-signing event. Indeed, the chapters seem to jump between the two distinct lines and another set of lesser related topics such as chapters dedicated to historical stories or other Wikipedia-style entries on concepts used or invented by Rabea. The aim was to give the reader a chance to 'click' away from the main story, then go back to it, offering sometimes insights into the main line or a smooth divergence away before quickly returning.
Language and communication plays a major role in the novel. The hero, Naim, suffers Wernicke's Aphasia, a communication disorder that resulted in total failure to utter the words he intends, replacing them by incomprehensible or sometimes alternative unrelated words. This illness causes Naim to lose his job, forcing him to return to his first job in binding books, sitting all day doing nothing after the binding business died away altogether. The symbolism here seems to reflect on how the citizen fails altogether to express himself, locked in his limited world and falling completely prey to the outside world communication.
Within this frame, the parallel line of communication to authority is opened with the president of Egypt, displaying letters that analyse Egyptians' behaviour and advises Mubarak in witty language how they could be controlled using media, police, healthcare, intelligence and, mainly, fear.
"Fear, my dear, is the solution. Even regimes plagued with democracy control their people through fear; this basic instinct that controls the smartest of people. They create an enemy, warning people of mass destruction, economic collapse, moral failure and of death.They speak to the masses, pointing their attention to the freak that scares them. Public fear is always the biggest and most influential in comparison to personal fear," one of these letter reads.
Rabea pauses to give certain words special attention in dedicated chapters, where he invents or otherwise conjures real history to describe them; for example the Arabic slang for pimp (used as an insult), also the name Abu Sabaa, and others. He explained during his book signing that he usually thinks deeply about language and words as carriers of meaning, and that this same carrier could embody a whole different meaning from time to time or person to person.
For Rabea, the question at hand is about means through which the Egyptian state controls lives. He offers two answers to that: first, the day-to-day challenge of bureaucracy that requires time, money and connections. Bureaucracy in Egypt isn't a boring story of someone tracking papers between desks of reluctant employees or unhelpful individuals, but rather a depiction of the knowledge, money and connections required to complete the tasks at hand. The pinnacle of the bureacracy is when a request for a 'pink death certificate' requires a trip underground beneath Mogamaa Al-Tahrir (largest government administration building in Cairo) with an elderly employee to eek out an empty pink form unknown to anyone else in the entire bureaucratic system.
The second means of control according to the letters is the state machine. Rabea describes, drenched in sarcasm, the struggles Egyptians had to endure through the regime, which working diligently to create challenges in their lives, including poverty, joblessness, to risking their bread, reputations, to the illusions constantly fed by media and rumours to exacerbate their suffering and keep them from lifting their heads up.
Written before the revolution, Rabea decided not to change anything in the script except to actually name the president; Mubarak. The questions Rabea poses as we look at post-revolution Egypt and how the new regime influences media and silences many opposition figures by shutting down the means to their audience. How much could really be changing?
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