Why I Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review reader Kabelo Motsoeneng introduces “The Library,” an excerpt from Mohammad Rabie’s novel Kawkab ’Anbar, translated by Elliott Colla for our Spring 2022 issue, “Decades of Fire.” You can purchase the issue here.
Sometimes literature translated into English can lack a kind of beauty and essential voice that might have existed in the original text. This is not necessarily the translator’s fault—it is merely that the English language is limited in capturing certain experiences that were not designed to be articulated by this tongue. The excerpt from Mohammad Rabie’s novel The Library, translated by Elliott Colla, popped off the page to me mainly because it refuses convention, is not reliant on the typical narrative moves favored by Western writers, the “Marie walked to the store” kind of sentences.
“What a lovely morning!” the story begins, commanding the reader’s attention. This voice, this gregarious narrator, reminds me of other narrators who are so memorable that you think about them even after you have put the story aside. The narrator delivers a story about a bureaucrat in Cairo who has to determine whether a library that was built for a poor young woman by a nobleman who deeply loved her might survive.
Rabie’s careful use of language, as exquisitely translated by Colla, is both surprising and delightful; while the story relies on spare language, it does not sacrifice narrative richness. Take this sentence for example: “They say that people were frightened by faucets and pipes back when the government first installed them.” The language is precise and not showy, but also revelatory: people were anxious about the infiltration of the government in their private lives, people mistrusted the government.
There is a possible crime I might be committing here, which is overreading simple details in a story to arrive at some meaning, because this is a story set in an Other world. The very idea that Rabie is reporting a human fact in the face of change—fear—and a condition of the world—change—compels me to make the claim that the simplicity of his language achieves more than it appears to on the surface. Yes, the installment of faucets and pipes is merely the installment of faucets and pipes, but you cannot read that sentence without thinking: why were people afraid of government-led modernization?
Rabie does not condescend to the reader, but allows the language to help the reader make meaning. At the end of this story, I found myself more curious about literature in translation; I found myself interested in reading about places beyond what I know; I found myself interested in other people. I think I have been changed, and perhaps this is what stories do when they are successful: they rewire your understanding of what art can achieve.
The Library
What a lovely morning! From the window, I look out over the villa next door that was converted into a day care center a number of years ago. The children are playing with their minders, their screams and shouts rising up through the air as they try to repeat the words of songs. Meanwhile, they make obscure gestures with their hands. I cannot understand what they mean when they spread their palms and wave them around in the air. Are they waving goodbye? Are they copying a dance move? Or is it just the foolishness of children?
I’m taking the day off. I decided that yesterday while I was in bed getting ready to go to sleep. I picked a novel at random, opened it to somewhere in the middle, and started reading. One of my friends once told me that I get a stupid look on my face whenever I do that, whenever I pick up a book and start reading it from somewhere in the middle. Remembering the stupid look, I put off reading for later. Now the novel is sitting on the bed after I managed to only read a few pages.
Now I’m thinking I’ll go to work after all. I woke up an hour ago. The empty house is boring. I prepare a note pad and pen for writing my observations and place them both in my leather briefcase. I open the library file. In the first third, I find a copy of an invoice, and discover that the library cabinets were supplied by Christo Furnishings of Bab al-Louq, each costing twelve pounds. A few pages later, I find that the ahmed muhammad farghali electrical plumbing and general contracting supplies firm—written just like that, without any capitalization—furnished the plumbing materials, including the pipes, fittings, sockets, valves, and faucets. The invoice contains the prices, with the quantity written in thick blue ink as if with a quill pen. In the white space at the bottom of the form, the following words were added: 32 nickel-plate, hooked faucets.
They say that people were frightened by faucets and pipes back when the government first installed them. People thought they were haram, prohibited by the law and custom of religion. Following that logic, it was similarly haram to drink from them, or to use them to perform ablutions. So people avoided them altogether and continued to rely instead on their local water sellers, insisting that the water be brought directly from the Nile, not from any of the pipes or faucets the government had installed throughout the neighborhoods of Cairo. This went on until the learned scholars of the Hanafi school met to study the issue from a religious-legal perspective. They arrived at the opinion that faucets were not haram, but rather halal, which is to say permitted. The fittings, they said, were really and very truly halal. People stopped referring to them as faucets and started calling them hanafi-things instead.
I turn on the faucet and say a little prayer for the soul of Mr. Hanafi, whose religious rationale had permitted their use. Then I add another prayer, this time damning the soul of whoever it was who put all the chlorine in our tap water these days. The smell of it is unbearably strong. I have to hold my breath just to splash my face.
I won’t eat breakfast at home today. I’ll take my time and go into work late instead, stopping along the way to eat at a fava bean cart. I’ll eat big fat favas, the kind that take forever to digest, the kind that nail your appetite shut and build your endurance and make you a real man. I’ll eat them with green onions, which will lead the people at the library to chuck me out.
In the file, there’s an essay from an old newspaper. The language is stuffed with the manner of rhetorical embellishment and verbosity that is completely out of fashion nowadays. I have to read the first few lines before I figure out that it tells the story of how the library was founded.
Conversations with Society’s Rejects
The fates decreed that I would espy her as she sat on the sidewalk selling grilled ears of corn. I had determined to break from convention and to report to you, esteemed readers, the things that coursed through her mind. Usually, those of us belonging to the tribe of newsmen and editors are in the established habit of bringing only the news and reports of the most powerful in society, the crème de la crème.
She wore tattered rags that belied the abject nature of her impoverished state and that form of distress and desperation that obtains in men who, in shame, shrink from the eyes of good society. Walking through the streets, this woman was not searching for sympathy, nor was she soliciting the generosity of passerby who sometimes might bestow alms, while at other times chastise her.
I struck up a conversation with her because I saw that she would make a compelling feature in newsprint. Our discourse began after I leisurely asked her to put a “cob” on the coals. She stoked the coals with a feather fan, much like a maestro stokes his lute with a feather pick. Then she spoke to me.
Pay me no heed, Sir, for I am like any of the simple poor folk of our native lands and have performed none of the fantastical miracles upon which readerly appetites feed. But I shall tell you a great love story, whose protagonists belonged to opposite worlds. One hero of the story was a young nobleman from the province of Gharbeyya, the other a humble young maiden from Alexandria. Love brought them together, but so did their shared love of poetry and belles-lettres.
The first time they met was at a poetry contest, which the young man won. Or rather, he won because the young woman let him win even though she would have triumphed if she’d continued. It was almost as if she knew who he was and what destiny had in store for her by way of this young man. The days passed, and the young man grew close to the maiden, and as lovers do, they began to share passion and longing in equal parts, as well as impatience and disquiet in similar proportion. The simple cause of all this was an obstacle that stood in the middle of their rose-covered path.
For the father of the man had been waiting for his son to announce an engagement to the daughter of an affluent cousin, or the daughter of a renowned politician, or the daughter of one of the great families of the land. So the man contrived to deceive his father into blessing a union with this maiden. Because he knew the secrets of his father’s soul, he prepared the most eloquent means of impression. He invited the young woman to the palace that very evening. The simple dress of the maiden, her humble mien and gaudy ornament, left an unwelcome mark on the breasts of the nobles and worthies sitting in the audience. But in his brilliance, the young man announced that the maiden would perform a poem of her own authorship, a composition as original as can be, which would leave a delightful imprint on the soul.
The audience was astonished at the audacity of a maiden who, it was claimed, would improvise lyric before their eyes, especially since in their number were two great poets of wide acclaim. But the maiden hesitated not, she came forward into the great salon of the palace. Standing tall and slender, she declaimed her original ode in a brave voice that was tender but insistent.
Because most in the audience were philistines and untutored in the fundamentals of verse and prose, they remained silent and unmoved even after the young woman had finished her recitations. The father, however, grasped the power and elegance of her verse. He waited for someone in the company to step forward and applaud the poetess. He watched them with an eye full of discernment and experience. Finally, he cast an inquisitive glance upon the famed poet Ahmed Bey Shawqi, who was sitting there like a king among his entourage. Shawqi Bey rose to his feet and approached the maiden. He took her slight, delicate hand and raised it to his lips. Then he said, in his resounding voice, “Truly, this young maiden standing among us this evening ranks among the most lyrical of all the poets I have met in my life.”
All the uncultured boors erupted in cheers and applause even though they neither knew nor grasped the reason. In this way, the father came to appreciate the depth of knowledge in this elegant, humble maiden, just as he came to see how ignorant and unrefined the others were.
The following day, the young man told his father of his determination to marry the girl, and acknowledged that the appearance of the bright star—of the maiden Kawkab, for that was her name—the evening before had been a ruse to introduce her into his presence. The young man admitted that he had been apprehensive of his father angering when he found out his intentions to marry a poor girl. The father laughed out loud, recalling to himself the young man’s mother, for she had been a poor French girl. He gave his blessing to the union and said, “Like father, like son!”
The young woman came to hold a great place in the hearts of father and son alike. She asked that he build a library in her name, saying this would be the only thing that would ever give her satisfaction, and that he contribute books to the collection so that it might become a qibla for all those seeking knowledge and culture. Kawkab would never care about the things that fascinated her female peers, not fashion in dress or hairstyle. She cared not for money, neither acquiring it, nor counting it. Rather, she wished only to be surrounded by people whose characters had been shaped by science and letters, whose lives had truly been made beautiful through social intercourse and fair-minded critique.
Since the young man had always met her every demand, how was he to delay a request that agreed so much with the passion of his life, the catalyst of his intellect? He did not for an instant tarry in realizing her priceless dream. He purchased for her this estate you see behind me, Sir. And he dedicated to her a wing for this library that was so dear to his heart, naming it as she had bade: The Kawkab Ambar Library.
When this woman—one of society’s most neglected—stopped speaking, I was overtaken by amazement. Despite my best intentions, the conversation had taken a turn back toward the rich and the powerful. How then was I to describe the legacy of that great woman, Kawkab Ambar?
Okay. So the woman grilling corn on the street attended the parties. Yes, it must be completely true. Wrap your head around that one: She was there. She sat in a corner of the palace, under the spotlight, as she grilled corn for the diamond-studded guests. Fantastique! Perhaps her host bestowed upon her the Golden Cob Award. For the man was a generous host who threw parties and was happy for his son to marry a girl he knew nothing about. And that phrase—recalling to himself the young man’s mother, for she had been a poor French girl—seems convincing evidence of the corn woman’s ability to read other people’s minds.
So that library was founded on account of love. I’ve heard of men erecting tombs to hold their deceased wives. But building a library for a wife? That’s new. I mean, that’s old. Old-fashioned. I love seeing a woman in a library. Even if it happened seventy years ago. Even if she’s dead and gone, and her memory exists solely in a single newspaper article and one marble plaque hanging on a wall. The whole thing seems completely preposterous, though, when I look at the men I’m surrounded by right now.
The library becomes the center of my work, and remains so for about a month. I won’t be stealing glances anytime soon at the young women who work in the offices next door. I have a thing for women, ugly and beautiful alike. I don’t differentiate between them, not even the old gray-hairs trimming okra at their desks. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Government employees have been forbidden from trimming vegetables during work for quite a while now. I love to watch women, looking for signs of faded beauty in eye shadow or in the delicate contours of a nose.
Sometimes I think that the government decided to employ women to soften the atmosphere of the office place, and to inhibit men from snorting and cursing at each other all the time. And then, of course, employing women in the public sector has assisted the efforts of a state keenly interested in organizing marriages for those who desire them. There are many ready opportunities for pairs of consummate youth to meet within the folds of government bureaux, to adopt the parlance of 1930s newspapers.
It is likely that Kawkab Ambar died—and her children as well—in poverty, after having poured their wealth into the library and books. It’s even more likely that Nasser kicked them out of the country, or nationalized their property, leaving her to die of grief from having lost so much. By their nature, love stories come to tragic ends. By their nature, they always contain a woman somewhere, or everywhere—in government ministries, libraries, films, and most definitely novels.
Excerpted and adapted from Mohammad Rabie’s novel Kawkab ’Anbar
Translated from the Arabic by Elliott Colla
To read the rest of Elliott Colla’s translation of “The Library,” you can purchase the issue here.
