In the early spring of 1967 – at Cairo University’s grand hall during a very well attended lecture by Jean Paul Sartre on the role of the intellectual – security forces dragged out Mohamed Ibrahim Mabrouk, a rising novelist, for allegedly plotting to assassinate President Gamal Abdel-Nasser. For months, Mabrouk was interrogated, tortured and humiliated. He was threatened that his mother would be raped if he did not share the full details of the alleged plot, of which he had no knowledge; neither did Ali Shalash, a journalist, arrested that same evening. During those months of agony and disgrace, Mabrouk found out about Egypt’s astounding defeat in the June 1967; the double shock of oppression and defeat derailed him.
Mabrouk’s horrific experience is far from being atypical of the 1960s. According to a recently published book, it is actually the story of a generation of intellectuals who entered the Egyptian literary scene with a vast amount of promising talents but were successively coerced by political repression and military defeat. In an attempt to overcome their personal humiliation and public disgrace, they chose to join a group of intellectuals and writers whose writing careers had started in the 1940s, publishing a literary and cultural magazine called Gallery 68.
The story of this supposedly apolitical, progressive and ill-fated magazine is recounted in a book that came out at the Cairo International Book Fair, Gallery 68: A Permissible Dance in a Small Rectangular, named after a work by Yahya Al-Taher Abdallah, one of the stars of the same generation of writers, “A Permissible Dance”. The little rectangular probably refers to the unusual format of the magazine.
Gallery 68 was a unique literary experiment that came out of the heart of a harsh military defeat, when Israel occupied Sinai along with the rest of historic Palestine and the Golan Heights. In 122 poetic and painful pages, Mohamed Riyad, an Egyptian poet and journalist, revisits the magazine that first came out in May 68, shortly before the Paris demonstrations, first against the university conditions and later against the authoritarian rule of Charles de Gualle. As such, the magazine, both poignantly and unintentionally, was a parallel cry against the tyrannical side of Nasser’s rule.
In six chapters, Riyad tells the story of the writers who were part of Gallery 68, not just as contributors, whose writing came out of the heart of defeat, dismay and disillusion with the dream that they had for the 1952 Revolution, but also as defiant souls. They were dedicated to transcending both defeat and the oppression that came before it. Mohamed Seif, a poet whose work appeared in Gallery 68, was a soldier on the front during the June war. He witnessed the indelible massacres and tragedies of defeat and subsequent withdrawal.
“The thing that stayed with me the most was the fact that as a human I felt humiliated – as if it was a personal defeat,” Seif said. After the horrors he saw during a disorderly withdrawal that took place under continued Israeli crimes, Seif went home to find that his family thought he was already dead; they had started accepting condolences.
In the wake of the defeat, Riyad reminds us, there were endless political and literary discussions about the way forward: “As such, Gallery 68 was a radiant spot in the midst of the heavy fog of the 1960s and the many calamities these [cruel] years wrought.”
Gallery 68 was essentially a magazine for the new trends but it was strongly supported by literary figures such as Yahya Hakki, Youssef Idris and Naguib Mahfouz – who made a generous financial contribution – as well others. Ultimately, the magazine was an exercise in experimental writing that could never have eluded the shadow of politics.
Riyad’s book is based on a careful examination of the very few issues that were printed before Gallery 68 stopped shortly after the death of Nasser, due to lack of funding, as well as interviews that were published down through the years by some of the writers who were associated with it who had survived; many others had committed suicide, died of of sudden strokes or lost their minds.
The book draws a parallel between the political coercion that Nasser exercised against all political opposition, which forced literature to seek safety in endless euphemisms and sent many writers into the horrific prison experiences, and the inevitability of a defeat that was not just military but also intellectual, “an astounding collapse that replaced the brave expectations”.
Still, from the aftermath of the defeat, political opposition was not permissible. Gallery 68 was actually a brave, at times timid or even hesitant, attempt to pursue the possible within the tight reign of the impossible. “It was an act of resistance by a generation who woke up to the illusions it had previously subscribed to,” Riyad writes.
Arguably, Riyad writes, Gallery 68 was the light that seemed to lead the way to a post-1967 moment – but easier said than done. It too suffered from the oppression that attempted to reign it in, just as it had three years earlier reigned in the socialist party by breaking it up and integrating it into the state’s Arab Socialist Union, the sole political platform of the 1960s.
The search for independence and funds, Riyad argues, was not the most difficult challenge for Gallery 68. It was rather the search for an unsullied balance between the unconformity in writing and compliance in politics. “It exploded from within… after having reflected the dreams and dismays of an entire generation – that of the 1960s ,” he stated.
The book is ultimately a tribute not just to the magazine and its writers but to the entire generation who flirted with hope and artists who experimented with creativity as their sole saviour when defeat hit and chaos took over.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 25 June, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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