{"id":26840,"date":"2023-06-19T08:19:09","date_gmt":"2023-06-19T06:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=26840"},"modified":"2023-06-21T07:49:35","modified_gmt":"2023-06-21T05:49:35","slug":"youssef-rakha-practices-literary-deception-in-emissaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/youssef-rakha-practices-literary-deception-in-emissaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Youssef Rakha Practices Literary Deception in Emissaries<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Emissaries and other short stories<\/em>, by Youssef Rakha
\nBarakunan<\/a> 2023 \/ audio book<\/a>
\nISBN 9781399933636<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Zein El-Amine<\/h4>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In his biography<\/a> of Vladimir Nabokov, Brian Boyd mentions that the Russian writer had a \u201cpenchant for literary deception.\u201d He quotes Nabokov explaining that he \u201cdetected in nature a playful deceptiveness and found nothing more exhilarating than the surprise of seeing through the deception to a new level of truth.\u201d Boyd adds that Nabokov was much the same in person; he quotes an acquaintance saying that the Russian writer \u201ctells you the truth then he winks at you to confuse you.\u201d This is a fitting description of the way that Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha relates his ten short stories in his newly released collection, Emissaries<\/em>. Rakha\u2019s narrators are all unreliable, winking at the reader to confuse them. But it is through that confusion that the reader can gain access to a higher truth.<\/p>\n

\"emissaries-and-other-short-stories
Emissaries<\/em> is published by Barakunan<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For one, several stories start with quotes from the Quran or the Bible, and the reader is left wondering about the purpose of these quotes. The confusion lies in the fact that the following narration turns against religion, either through the narrator or through the narration itself. If there is one word that describes the tone of this work, it would be \u201cirreverence.\u201d The stories are chock-full of contradictions.<\/p>\n

The characters that inhabit Rakha\u2019s world are constantly in flux, changing their political and religious views and, sometimes, their gender. In the first story, \u201cThe Boy Jihadi,\u201d the residents of a building have an encounter with a \u201cjihadi boy\u201d carrying an \u201cancient Kalashnikov\u201d and a mysterious package. The residents, who are described as \u201cupstanding families, good citizens, and good Muslims, the pride and joy of their developing country\u2019s bourgeoisie,\u201d are incensed and want to defend their neighborhood. But their view of this boy changes as they begin to interact with the police and the state. Their sympathies shift when the cops assigned to their building turn out to be more of a nuisance than the boy. Since this story, like all of the stories in this collection, centers on the 2011 Arab Spring uprising in Egypt, the events mimic the greater historical arc: the transition from a revolutionary period to the reactionary reign of the Muslim Brotherhood, followed by a military dictatorship parading as a democracy.<\/p>\n

The characters are mired in defeat and do not act of their own will. There is always some powerful entity, real or fantastical, dictating their actions. Several of the stories have shadowy organizations that seem to be controlling events from behind the curtain. This brings to mind Egypt\u2019s current military rule, in which political activists are monitored and arrested en masse<\/em> \u2014 according to the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, the country had as many as 65,000<\/a> political prisoners in 2021.\u00a0 [Human Rights Watch<\/a> claims \u201cEgypt under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi\u2019s government has been experiencing one of its worst human rights crises in many decades.\u201d ED.<\/strong>]<\/p>\n

A slight figure, almost as short and thin as the ancient Kalashnikov it cradled \u2013 immediately we were incensed. How dare such a thing as this invade the living space of two dozen upstanding families, good citizens, and good Muslims, the pride and joy of their third-world country\u2019s bourgeoisie.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Paul
Paul Bowles, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs in Tangier circa 1954 (photographer unknown).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The beat poets and writers, especially William Burroughs<\/a> but also Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, figure indirectly in several of the stories. These are all writers that had spent some time in North Africa, specifically Morocco. At times, Rakha\u2019s writing itself takes a Burroughsian surrealist turn. The language is as dense and elusive as that of Burroughs, especially in its nods to his classic Naked Lunch<\/em>.<\/p>\n

While I am referencing writers that seem to have influenced Rakha (though that kind of imitation might be mockery), what prepared me most for the bizarre logic of the stories is having read Japanese writer Haruki Murakami<\/a>. But make no mistake, Rakha is an original. His command of the English language is quite deft. His use of imagery is original, evocative, and concise. He can render a scene or a personality in an otherwise throwaway line. His vivid prose straps you into the story as it takes sharp narrative turns that shake it loose from its grounding in the mundane realities of Egyptian society.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In \u201cThus Spoke Che Nawwarah,\u201d a revolutionary by the name of Khalid Nawwarah plans on sodomizing a Muslim Brotherhood candidate for office by the name of Sheikh Arif. He considers this to be a revolutionary act. The story takes place on July 20, 2012, in the wake of the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak. In this period, the Brotherhood had the upper hand when it came to the first democratic elections after the revolution because they had experience in running elections under the harshest conditions. Here, as in other stories, the author makes several American pop culture references. In this case, he compares the sheikh with Stewie Griffin (the evil genius toddler in the TV series Family Guy<\/em>). This is because of what he sees as the sheikh\u2019s childish desire to take over the world. Rakha draws you into the surreal logic of the story, which becomes more bizarre by the minute. In reading this story and others in the collection, you sometimes get the feeling that Rakha, in his sarcasm, is not only mocking the powers that be, but also the powers that could have been, the \u201crevolutionaries\u201d themselves.<\/p>\n

In the titular story, \u201cEmissaries,\u201d we are treated to an alien visitation in a Cairo office setting. The narrator of the story is told that there are visitors in the conference room. When he enters the room, he finds that the space has been transformed by the aliens that sent him on a mission, one of the many missions that Rakha\u2019s characters are assigned. Without giving away anything, Rakha is not much for neatly bounded endings; rather, he speeds up the action and then cuts it off suddenly, sending the reader coasting in wonder.<\/p>\n

The story \u201cNawwah\u201d is another that is peppered with Western cultural references (Ginsberg, Jim Morrison, and Jack Kerouac). And this one is also reminiscent of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch<\/em> in tone. The main character receives instructions from the \u201cPlant,\u201d one of the several shadowy organizations in the book, to deliver a corpse to one of the Plant\u2019s agents, who goes by the name Nastassja Kinski (in reference to the German actress). This is again one of Rakha\u2019s stories in which he very nearly assails the reader with out-of-context cultural references and scientific dictum. Even within the short span of the story, he never resolves a conflict before introducing another. During his mission, the narrator travels to the coastal city of Alexandria, where he meets with the ghost of his father. There are tender moments in this story, as in the interaction between father and son; this is rare in a collection of stories that are otherwise stripped of sentimentality. At one point, his handler Kinsky gives him something that \u201clooks like a giant termite.\u201d She informs him that this insect will provide him with instructions on what to do with it on his return to Cairo.<\/p>\n

This brings to mind the giant insect typewriter in Burroughs’s Naked Lunch<\/em>. That insect typewriter informs Bill Lee, the main character in the novel, that he is an agent on a mission and instructs him, among other things, to engage in homosexual activities. This resonates with Rakha\u2019s characters, who on the one hand, and out of the blue, deny that they are gay, but who end up engaging in homosexual activity. It’s hard to parse the intention behind such a narrative, but like all of Rakha\u2019s stories in this collection, it leaves you sifting through the implications well beyond the end of the story.<\/p>\n

I have not read many works by Arab American writers writing in English, but Rakha\u2019s collection is original, irreverent, and provocative. What engages one most in reading his stories is the language he employs. Even though he is referencing Western pop culture and writers throughout the book, his voice is original. In wielding such prose, Rakha is a pied piper leading the reader into his rabbit holes. The consistency in that voice and the recurring motifs in the book make for a solid read. And in grounding these stories in the history of the recent Egyptian revolution and its aftermath, he conveys the truth about Egyptian society. But at the same time, in the fantastic or surreal turns that he takes, he is winking at you to make you second-guess your perceptions.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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