Now and Then

By Salah el Moncef, Stephen Watt and Mari Ruti

As its title suggests, Now & Then is an urgent plea to revisit the present in relation to the past-to bear in mind the admonition that "The past is never dead. It's not even past" (William Faulkner). Lurking behind the warning is a ponderous question that haunts this collection of stories and essays: Are we going to have to relive i

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penelope Books
• Release date: Sep 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9782494412026

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Salah el Moncef was born in Kuwait City, Kuwait. He is the author of The Offering, Atopian Limits, and Art as Pharmakon. His short fiction, largely focused on the Arab diaspora experience, has been published in numerous British and American magazines and anthologies. He is a five-time Fulbright scholar and a recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence in the Humanities. Moncef is Reader in English and Creative Writing at Nantes University, France.

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Copyright © 2023 by Salah el Moncef

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Conventions.

Printed in the United States of America

First edition, 2023

All characters, localities, and business establishments represented in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual places or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moncef, Salah el, author.

Now and Then / by Moncef, Salah el, author.

ISBN: 9782494412026

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

Contents

Introduction

Benghazi

Preface

The Night Visitor

A Bridge Too Near

The Voice of Exile

Introduction

Assuming mankind survives its current battles with unrelenting viral opponents, the new normal for the most fortunate among us might include a return to more adventurous travel, pleasurable odysseys that often begin at the airport. And for many flyers, excluding those fantasists who like to impersonate doctors or laboratory scientists, the relegation of surgical masks to desk drawers cluttered with orphaned keys and crumpled receipts will certainly enhance the experience. Longer journeys, however, demand more diversion than unimpeded respiration can supply, immersion in an intriguing memoir or history, for example. In her Introduction to The Offering (2015), Mari Ruti recalls such an experience reading Salah el Moncef’s gripping detective story of murder, mayhem, and mental illness while making the over five-hour flight from Los Angeles to Boston. Captivated by the intricacies of the plot, she was grateful to hear the plane’s captain announce that a storm necessitated an hour-long holding pattern before landing, as the delay afforded her more time with this extraordinary novel. As Ruti is quick to explain, however, while readers of The Offering are rendered breathless by its narrative, this excitement is only one of its attractions; the ambiguity and complexity of the novel’s protagonist Tariq Abbassi, for instance, are similarly engaging. The victim of a traumatic brain injury that has shattered his memory of a tragic accident, Tariq hopes to salve the unspeakable pain of the event, pain that complicates his attempts to forge a life in Paris and, later, Bordeaux that also feels livable. More broadly, as I underscored in the Los Angeles Review of Books (April 4, 2015), although the narrative of The Offering enthralls readers with the mysteries and heart-rending particulars of Tariq’s life (and death, as noted in the second paragraph of the Foreword), his struggles are also emblematic of the plight of diasporic subjects who seem never fully at home in their new country—or their old one. The final essay of Now and Then, The Voice of Exile, returns to Tariq, a displaced Tunisian national and trauma victim living in France, and so will I in my conclusion.

Like Ruti’s Introduction, the back cover of The Offering is, for my purposes, also useful because of the quartet of blurbs to be found there. Taken together, these endorsements provide a summation of two of the novelist’s signal achievements: the aesthetic elegance of his prose and his ability to pull off an amazing narrative trick in this postmodern-cum-magical realist work. Further suggestive of the range of this artistry and erudition are the backgrounds of the blurbists (a seldom-used designation, thank God!): an accomplished writer and student of language (Rebecca Gowers), and three exceptional poets (Willis Barnstone, Khaled Mattawa, and Philip Metres) whose corpus of work extends to translation, textual criticism, and cultural theory. Albeit helpful in reading The Offering, such expertise is perhaps even more welcome in sifting through the nuances of Now and Then, a volume of both fiction and speculative criticism. That el Moncef would undertake such a combinatory project is hardly surprising. After all, he is a sophisticated scholar-critic himself and has been for more than two decades as demonstrated by such texts as Atopian Limits: Questions of Self, Complexity, and Contingency in the Postmodern American Narrative (2002) and his fine essay Minor Literature in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory (online, 2020; print, 2022). So, while the novella (Benghazi) and novelette (The Night Visitor) featured in Now and Then are presciently anticipated by these four readers, the volume’s two essays epitomizing el Moncef’s larger political project demand a slightly different approach.

My purpose here is, first, to sketch preliminary maps of Benghazi and The Night Visitor, then construct routes between the novella and novelette while, on occasion (now and then), slipping away down a few side streets and dark alleys. The major thoroughfares between the pair are both narrative and stylistic; the lesser-traveled roads lead to emotionally resonant moments in each story that dominate characters’ memories and instantiate alternatively paralytic and compulsive symptoms. Then, I hope to summarize the arguments of the essays in Now and Then, A Bridge Too Near: Détournement and the Promise of a Transnational Conscience and The Voice of Exile, both of which emerge from the discourses of cultural theory, particularly postcolonialism and critiques of nationalism, and both of which posit an alternative to what Benedict Anderson famously termed the imagined community of nationhood. My task also includes the forging of connections between el Moncef the theorist and el Moncef the novelist though, like all writers, he is under no obligation to facilitate such pathways. At the dawn of the previous century (and slightly before), Bernard Shaw prefaced his plays and novels with polemics about tenement housing, industrial capitalism, the affective consequences of poverty, and other topics that greatly transcended the scope of the work it preceded; as a novelist, Virginia Woolf refined modernist aesthetics while, as a feminist, she served as a powerful advocate for social equality and the expansion of educational opportunities for women. Yet, because the political aspirations of the essays in Now and Then respond directly to the multicultural worlds depicted in el Moncef’s fiction, they should be read as not only articulating a progressive critique of nationalism, but also as identifying one origin of his characters’ internal conflicts.

Although the provenances of the protagonists’ conflicts in Benghazi and The Night Visitor are less convoluted than those plaguing Tariq Abbassi, they are just as crucial to understanding both stories. And their exposition is more straightforward—how could it be otherwise? The Offering, as its Foreword clarifies, conveys a story and, at the same time, is the story of that story: the text’s recovery from the recesses of a near-defunct laptop owned by its deceased author, its serial rejection by disinterested publishers, its delivery to an American editor who patched it up as best she could, its typesetting in England, and eventual printing. By contrast, both stories in Now and Then begin in a comfortably familiar way: over cups of coffee and conversation. In the opening scene of Benghazi, Mariam Khaldoon and her husband Basil, a professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, enjoy a sachertorte and coffee on a bright April morning in 1976. He leaves her momentarily, returning with a bulbous envelope with the words A GET WELL WISH inscribed in gold letters on the outside. She discovers a gift and note inside, the opening sentences of which suggest both the appropriateness of Basil’s gift—an elegant Parker fountain pen—and the existence of a specter from her past impeding her progress as a writer:

One way to deal with the sickness of the past would be to assume that some things that made us sick are now essential to our healing in the long run. Please finish your amazing story, and I will proudly translate the rest with as much delight as I translated Part One.

His alternatively encouraging and pleading tone and the GET WELL inscription on the envelope intimate that Mariam’s paralysis as a writer is both debilitating and ongoing. Will completing her draft function therapeutically in confronting the sickness of her past? The story’s introduction ends with her resolve to do just that: "This is probably the best time to do it—finish what I started." The best time to confront that other spring, and the roiling years that led up to it."

Mariam’s project transports readers from 1970s America to Libya in 1942, then earlier to 1939 when her father suffered a fatal heart attack, and finally 1937, the year Benito Mussolini came to Benghazi. Mussolini’s visit was a major event for the city, and its planners worked on the pageantry of his arrival as if they were designing an operatic or theatrical production. A platform was erected in the city’s central piazza with flags and banners (including the Italian tricolore) flanking it on all sides. As Anna Burns notes in her Man Booker Award-winning novel Milkman (2018), flags, particularly national flags, were invented to be instinctive and emotional—often pathologically, narcissistically emotional—and such is the case on this afternoon in Benghazi. When Il Duce, attired in military regalia and astride a black Arabian stallion, entered the square, he was greeted by a hurricane of cheers and applause; the crowd’s mad excitement swelled further when he unsheathed the Sword of Islam and waved it triumphantly over his head. The day had been made even more momentous for the Khaldoons when it was announced earlier that not only would Mussolini visit the Scuola Elementare e Media Giovanni Gentile where Mariam, then ten years old, and her older sister Zaynab were students, but that both sisters were chosen to meet him. Zaynab was given the further honor of delivering the school’s official welcome. And she did so brilliantly. The sound of her crystal-clear voice and flawless Italian when reading the speech caused Mariam to glow with pride. Even the visiting colonizer was impressed:

That achievement had apparently worked its way swiftly into the heart of the semi-clownish tyrant who looked so stiff and flushed, as if straitjacketed in his otherworldly uniform. He raised his eyebrows, popped his eyes wide, and gave my sister a deep nod of respectful admiration.

Mussolini’s nod of approval was accompanied by his enthusiastic "Brava, brava. Yet, with a precocity that seems both telling and discordant, Mariam, who moments earlier had detected in his facial expression the combination of a crybaby sulk and disgusted wince, saw in Il Duce’s enthusiasm only a semi-clownish tyrant in otherworldly" uniform. Where does this acerbity, something we have not recognized until this moment, originate? What factors account for this schoolgirl’s cynicism?

As we learn later, not everyone in her family, one in which loyalty was valued more highly than any other virtue, shared in the refulgence of the day. Not everyone, it seems, was delighted by the ostentation of the pageantry and the display of the Italian tricolore. In fact, long before this extraordinary afternoon, Zaynab and Mariam’s enrollment at the Mussolini school was, in some quarters of the family, quietly opposed. But surely this disagreement over schools or the sisters’ featured role in the dictator’s welcome wasn’t responsible for Mariam’s writerly paralysis? Even raising such a question recalls Mari Ruti’s quandary in her Introduction to The Offering: How am I to discuss this novel without giving away some of the plot elements that make it such a rewarding reading experience? Her solution, reasonably enough, is to avoid the narrative and stick to the story’s emotional and existential resonances, and, for the most part, I will follow her lead. In a few instances, however, parsimony may be preferable to total avoidance, as unsatisfying as this miserly strategy might prove. So, I’ll say this much: Something else did happen as a result of this eventful day. And nearly forty years after the Italian fascist’s appearance in Benghazi, Mariam, buoyed by her husband’s encouragement and moved by his entreaty, decides to confront the thing she has not written about or, rather, not been able to write about. One last crumb of information: this thing, slowly revealed as the story progresses, is as beautifully described as it is painfully, and subtly, recounted.

The Night Visitor begins in similar fashion. On a lovely fall afternoon, Nausicaa Durand, a recent graduate of the Sorbonne who, a year before, successfully landed a teaching job at a high school in Paris’s twelfth district, and her friend Pauline are having a smoke at their favorite café in the heart of Quartier Latin. In the midst of their conversation or, rather, in a brief respite in the middle of her peroration, Nausicaa stumbles toward an unsettling epiphany: "What am I doing? I’m actually discussing him. It’s so weird." In fact, the story begins with a sense