For a long time, Alaa El Aswany alternated writing work and treatment in her dental practice in Cairo. Long after the resounding success of his Yacoubian building, adapted for the cinema by Marwan Hamed and sold more than 2 million copies worldwide, including nearly 500,000 in France since 2006, the man with impressive build wielded the cutter and the pen, just interrupted by a year of raised fists because of revolution, from January 20, 2011. Son of an intellectual upper-middle-class family – his father was a writer and lawyer, notably of the famous Automobile Club -, Dr Alaa El Aswany, graduated in Cairo and in Chicago, has in fact never stopped perpetuating his father’s humanist ideas, fighting against Hosni Mubarak, Mohamed Morsi, then General Al-Sissi and “his dictatorial excesses”. Until he writes I ran towards the Nile, published in 2018. “As soon as I finished the first chapter of this novel devoted to the Arab Spring, I told my wife, we will have to leave,” he confides to us, during his stay in Paris on the occasion of the release of his brand new (and enchanting) novel, In the evening of Alexandria.
This is because censorship ended up falling heavily on the most famous Egyptian writer: “As soon as Mr. Sissi came to power, I was banned from writing, publishing, appearing on television, doing editorial meetings. Everyone who was known to have played a role in the revolution was either imprisoned or expelled from Egypt. Given his great notoriety, the novelist was not thrown in prison – there are currently between 60,000 and 120,000 political prisoners – but, his life having been made impossible for him, here he is in the United States with his family, where he teaches at various universities. And continues the fight, in its own subtle, captivating way, as evidenced by this In the evening of Alexandria, fruit of four years of work. We are no longer in Cairo, the setting for his main opuses (The Yacoubian Building, The Automobile Club of Egypt…) but in Alexandria, a city which is dear to him, he tells us, having spent all his holidays there from a very young age: “At the beginning of the 1960s, Alexandria was still an exemplary cosmopolitan city, everyone was accepted, Greeks, Jewish Egyptians, Italians, Armenians, French… But, one day, all my friends at the time who were of European origin had to leave.”
“Nasser was our father, and we cannot accept that our father is humiliated”
It is this transition towards the hardening of the military dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser, in power from 1954 to his death in 1970, that Alaa El Aswany tells us through a myriad of characters to whom we become attached throughout the chapters. from his abundant novel running from the year 1964. There is Lyda there, the owner of the restaurant Artinos, place of alcoholic nocturnal reunions of a group of intellectuals; Abbas, the honest lawyer; Anas, the painter, implacable against Nasser and the idolatry that surrounds him; Tony, the brilliant paternalistic business leader of Greek origin; Chantal, the French bookseller who escaped the expulsions which followed the “tripartite aggression of 1956” (France, United Kingdom, Israel) thanks to her connections; Carlo, the dazzlingly handsome butler, a crush of married women…
The verbal jousts follow one another, friendship predominates but danger lurks, the surveillance of the political police becomes pressing. “Nasser was honest, courageous, he loved his country,” explains Alaa El Aswany, “but, whatever the personality of the dictator, the dictatorship, intrinsically xenophobic, generates horrible crimes and uses conspiracy theories. The leader then protects the people, who idolize him, as I tried to analyze in Dictatorship Syndrome. Thus, even after the worst defeat in our history, the Six-Day War, Nasser remained in power. He was our father, and we can never accept our father being humiliated.”
And today? “60% of the Egyptian population, or some 70 million people, are under 30 years old. These young people made the revolution and will continue it, there is no inevitability,” says a resolutely optimistic Aswany. In his eyes, it would therefore be a question of time. On the other hand, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict terrifies him. “This is a very sad moment in world history. I am 100% against the ideology of Hamas and political Islam, but this tragedy goes beyond all that. Killing civilians is a war crime. No one will be able to eradicate the other side, we must live together And there will never be peace without justice.
In the evening of Alexandria, by Alaa El Aswany. Trans. from Arabic (Egypt) by Gilles Gauthier. Actes Sud, 384 p., €23.50.
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