Blue Aubergine

By Al-Tahawy

Blue Aubergine tells the story of a young Egyptian woman, born in 1967, growing up in the wake of Egypt's defeat of that year, and maturing into womanhood against the social and political upheavals Egypt experienced during the final decades of the twentieth century. Physically and emotionally scarred by her parents and the events of her childhood, and incapable of relating to men, Nada, the 'Blue Aubergine,' fumbles through a series of dark and unsettling adventures, resorting first to full Islamic dress with niqab and gloves and then throwing it all off for the flowing hair and tight clothes of an emancipated young graduate student, in an ever more desperate and ultimately failed search for tenderness and affection.

A frank assessment of the damage society wreaks by foisting unwise claustrophobic values on its children, this richly woven text shifts unpredictably through time and space like a sojourn in dream time. A mixed crowd of aunts and teachers, classmates and fellow students, Marxists and Islamicists are there to people the Blue Aubergine's bewildering journey to the knowledge that the maintenance of chastity and innocence and her naïve determination to cling to the threads of silk and lace that bind her to her past bring only misery and isolation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Release date: May 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781617971907

Book preview

Blue

Aubergine

Miral al-Tahawy

Translated by

Anthony Calderbank

The American University in Cairo Press

Cairo New York

English translation copyright © 2002 by

The American University in Cairo Press

113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt

420 Fifth Avenue, New York. NY 10018

www.aucpress.com

Copyright © 1998 by Miral al-Tahawy

First published in Arabic in 1998 as al-Badhinjana al-zarqa’

Protected under the Berne Convention

First paperback edition 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Dar el Kutub No. 14057/05

ISBN 978 161 797 190 7

2  3  4  5  6  7  8    14  13  12  11  10  09  08

Printed in Egypt

For the little boy who shared my pain My brother, Mahmoud

Translator’s Introduction

Although Miral al-Tahawy’s novel Blue Aubergine, unlike The Tent, is set in real time, the text still displays the complex texture that is set to become her hallmark, where present, future, and past mingle and merge, where reference is obscure, where myth and tale hover on the edge of reality, and where dream time is only ever a whisper away. In Blue Aubergine, high classical masters stand side by side with Nada’s own poetical musings, the young letters she sends to her brother Nader, the short texts she writes to understand herself, and the deliberately constructed argument of her Ph.D. Nada gropes her way through tunnels and dark mazes hoping one day to cut the threads of silk and lace that bind her to her past. The reader will be jolted by the ruptures in time and only at the end will realize what the chronology was.

On the surface, the novel is divided simply into three sections, the three periods of Nada’s life. The first is her childhood and early adolescence, where the three grandmothers establish her rich and truly Egyptian pedigree of peasant, Bedouin, and bourgeoisie. Here the seeds of Nada’s misery are sown, as the solemn mysteries of the family tie and the psychological and behavioral oddities it engenders begin their work. The second section tells of her four years at Cairo University, and the narration is shared with Nada’s roommate Safaa. Though their paths move out in strikingly different directions, both young women are on a very similar journey, and both react with equal extremism in the world of student politics and mores.

The third part reveals Nada as an adult, working as a teacher, doing her doctorate, wanting a husband and a baby, and, of course, falling in love. It is set to the majestic prose of Ibn Hazm, author of the medieval Arabic masterpiece, The Ring of the Dove. The work is a collection of ditties and reflections mixed with verses of poetry and real-life examples on the subject of love and the states of those who fall in love. Each episode in the third part begins with a few lines from The Ring of the Dove; their clarity and directness help to earth the frenetic inner dialogue of Blue Aubergine as she suffers the pangs and horrors of bad love.

The neat partition into three, however, is violated by premonitions and phantom-like reminiscences that move through Nada’s life without regard for time and space. Even when she is a small child we know that one day Nada the woman will sit next to her boyfriend in the cinema and notice his teeth, and that she will begin to forgive her mother only after she experiences the emotional desolation of rejection. Nada the little girl will still dig her tunnels and listen to grandma Sitti’s songs until the end. So neat divisions between child and adult do not exist, but instability and betrayal characterize the two, and behind it all Blue Aubergine’s one preoccupation; how to relate to men, how to get love and affection, stimulation and satisfaction, in a way that family and society approve of. What must be a hapless task at the best of times is only compounded by Nada’s crushing self-doubt and fumbling innocence.

A translator has the privilege of being able to float on the open sea of meaning far away from the shores of language, where physical limitations like vocabulary and structure stifle and distort unvoiced thought. It is a place where text can exist without words, but then when you drag your Arabic booty out of the water onto English sands, a certain amount of force is necessary if the reader is to be satisfied. In using English words to tell Blue Aubergine’s story I have done some violence to the Arabic, but I have tried to keep it to a minimum. I have left some Arabic words so that you can feel them in your mouth. I have tried to convey the playing with time, which takes readers inside the narrative and shows them time as Nada sees it, but it is not easy to make verbs in the future tense mean the past in English. I have tried to preserve the pace and economy of the original and have refrained from adding proper names where the pronoun referents might be ambiguous. I hope that by employing these techniques I have been able to reciprocate some of the damage done to the Arabic by putting a bit of strain on the English. So if you’re not sure which of the previous two shes the third she refers to, I invite you to invoke your narrative feel and sense it.

Finally I would like to thank J. Arberry, whose translation of The Ring of the Dove proved extremely helpful, N.J. Dawood for his translation of the Quran, and my wife Roberta for being sensible about some of the madder things I wanted to say.

One

A Swing for the Girl with the Gorgeous Teeth

My mother wanted me to be a princess, so she made me wear shoes that were too small and tethered a small filly, which she named after me, to the camphor tree next to our house. At night she talked to me about her sadness. I would have to become taller because all princesses had slender figures. My father wanted me to be an astronomer. Perhaps I would discover dazzling things and name a galaxy after him. He believed I was a genius and I was obliged to believe it too.

My brother never openly expressed what he wanted me to be, but without him saying anything I strove to prove to him that I was a saint who prayed a lot and asked forgiveness for sins which I never dreamed of committing.

They soon discovered that I would be a disappointment. It took me a little longer to realize that I was just like any other girl. I dreamed there was a horse by the camphor tree carrying a man who proclaimed his love for me and whisked me off the balcony in the moonlight to discover worlds unknown. It was not important to name them after my father. We would carve our own names and believe that God is Merciful and does not consider love a mortal sin.

I was late in discovering this, so I made do with buying a fish which I called Irma. Irma danced in her bowl before me as I spent time carefully observing my failures, maintaining that my genius had yet to be revealed.

When it’s your time to pass away

And mourners come respects to pay,

No male will greet them at the gate

For to bear this girl has been your fate.

The grandmother greeted the newborn babe with this dirge. She was blue, just like an aubergine, because she could only manage to stay in Queen Nariman’s belly for seven months. The swelling of the Queen’s belly, which appeared only months after the marriage, was considered something of an embarrassment. Her friends, when they were sitting around her on the balcony, their shapely legs crossed, would say to her: Why all the rush, darling. It’s not good for your health. Plump Aunt Habiba would finish off the créme caramel on her plate and laugh in her relaxed way as she said: Children or your life?

Aunt Nawal smokes and dances and walks like Ragaa al-Gedawi and keeps all the back copies of Hawa magazine. She puts her cigarette in the ashtray and waves her finger in Nariman’s face:

Yogurt’s very important for your face at this stage so you don’t get freckles and spots. Don’t touch the area around your eyes, darling. Rub it with moisturizer from bottom to top, the opposite way to the lines of your eyes.

Aunt Fawqiya, the schoolteacher, doesn’t say a word. She knits clothes for the baby and looks sadder than everyone else because she has no children.

Saad Basha rejoices because he is an only child and he wants a family bigger than a tribe. Children to support him, and girls: one a mother, the other a sister, the third a daughter, and the rest, he will find places for them all in his heart. He sends news of his joy in letters which Nariman keeps under her pillow.

Saad Basha is a surgeon. He’s at the front at Tel al-Kebir Military Hospital. When they put the lights out during air raids it reminds them that he is a brave man who is not afraid of the burns and amputated limbs he sees on the soldiers in combat jackets. And as she does her embroidery under the kerosene lamp Nariman will remember that she is in a small village, not in Cairo or Alexandria. True, it is the land of her father, and his grandfather before him, but all her friends and cousins simply call it the farm. The farm they visit at feasts and holidays and when they invite their friends to come and look at the peasants. She’s terribly depressed. She feels that she is in the wrong place. She looks at the swelling in her belly. When it arrives there will be an opportunity to discuss its future and its education in a more suitable environment.

Under the sign of Cancer, in the year of the Monkey, one thousand nine hundred and sixty-seven, she will fall from the belly of Queen Nariman one midnight. The search lights in the sky confirm a new air raid and the noise of the bombs is not far away. In the darkness the Queen has no choice but to give birth at the hands of the grandmother without an operating theater, anesthetic, or sterilized instruments. With the kitchen knife the umbilical cord will be cut but the knife will not be as sharp as it should have been. Sitti will sharpen it on the pumice stone she uses to scrub her heels and she will put a rag in the Queen’s mouth. Once the raid is over they will discover it is filthy. But a woman has to bite on something while she’s giving birth, and in the dim light of the small oil lamp it was impossible to tell black from white. When she wipes the sweat and the afterbirth off the belly of the Queen, she won’t find enough perfume left in the spilled bottle to sterilize the wound.

After seven days no one will celebrate the birth of the blue aubergine she had brought into the world because the father did not return, and the passing air raids became the defeat of 1967, and the Queen’s teeth were chattering from fear of tetanus, which might easily afflict her after such a birth.