Covering Sonallah
For years I had been searching for it: the first edition of That Smell, Sonallah Ibrahim’s revolutionary novella. When it came out in 1966, authorities had censored it and critics panned it. Today it is considered an unsentimental classic that catapulted Arabic literature into a new phase. And, like a cherry on top, the cover of the original edition had been drawn by the late Egyptian caricaturist Mustafa Hussein. But where do you find a novel that was banned five decades ago?
Go straight to the source.
For the spring issue of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, I interviewed Sonallah Ibrahim. Before we started talking, Ibrahim pulled out of a copy of that fateful first edition from one of his towering bookshelves. The cover was much simpler than I had imagined. None of the ornate flourishes typical of Hussein’s illustrations: just a naked man, head cocked to the right, looking more amphibian than human. The title is scrawled out in tortuous calligraphy—every bit as darkly beautiful as the prose inside.
Over the next two hours, Ibrahim sounded off about the rule of President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, the imprisonment of author Ahmed Naji, and much more.
Here is an extract from our conversation:
JONATHAN GUYER: Why do you write novels?
SONALLAH IBRAHIM: When I was a teenager I would buy every newspaper available. If I didn’t have money, I would agree with the seller that I would read it and bring it back for half price. Really my passion was the press. All my attempts to join a newspaper or magazine failed. Right after coming out of prison I went to Rose El-Youssef, and they said no. I went to other papers. Someone I knew was in charge of Al-Gomhouriya, a daily paper. I started doing stories and submitting them. I did an interview with the Soviet poet [Yevgeny] Yevtushenko, who had come on a visit. I noticed that he was wearing a watch in the shape of a triangle, and I wrote that in the interview. The man at the paper said to me, “Really, what kind of watch? Are you making it up?” At that time, when I had started writing That Smell, I started to feel that that form of expression was more comfortable for me, completely free, that I could say or do anything.
***
After the interview, I began to notice that many of Egypt’s great cartoonists had contributed covers to Ibrahim's paperbacks. Nabil Tag drew Beirut, Beirut. Hegazi (or someone pastiching Hegazi’s style) penned Sharaf. Mohi El-Din El-Labad composed a collage cover for Zaat.
Who better than a cartoonist to capture the humor and minimalism of Ibrahim’s singular approach to writing?
Zaat, 1992, by Labbad
***
From Left to Right: Beirut Beirut, 1988, by Nabil Tag; The Committee, 1982, by Salah Enani; Sharaf, c.1998, perhaps by Hegazi.
***
Read “Plight of an Arab Intellectual,” my extended interview with Sonallah Ibrahim, in the new issue of the Cairo Review.
