Angel Lust

Egyptian writer Yasser Abdellatif’s hybrid text, Angel Lust, interweaves historical reconstruction, fiction, and commentary to draw connections between its cast of characters and a crime and its ironic afterlife in popular culture. We are introduced to Salah Abou Helawa, who was executed by hanging in the mid-1980s for his part in a notorious gang rape in Maadi, a wealthy suburb of Cairo. We witness a fictional encounter between six schoolboys and a mysterious young woman that steers us back to the character of Abou Helawa. And we meet the actor Hamdi El Wazir, who played Abou Helawa in the 1989 film The Rapists.

Originally published by The Sultan’s Seal, a literary website based in Cairo, Angel Lust takes its name from the Victorian slang for postmortem priapism, a condition typical in victims of hanging, and offers an atmospheric yet devastating treatment of class, sexuality, and popular culture in Egyptian society over the last forty years. Met in translation, this excerpt of Angel Lust extends an invitation to the English reader to step into a distinct spatial culture, and to listen in to the unique dialect of a time and place.

— Raaza Jamshed, Guernica Global Spotlights

n the presence of the rope, standing on the platform, and in reply to the traditional question, he told the executioners and men of law that his last request was to be washed, so as not to meet his Lord unclean. They’d dragged him from his cell to the place where he would die, and the shit had run out of him uncontrollably, like water. Piss flowing as though a tap had been spun open. By the time they reached the execution chamber, his red