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WORK TITLE: The Queue
WORK PROTES: trans by Elisabeth Jaquette
PSEUDONYM(S): Abd al-Aziz, Basmah
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Cairo
STATE:
COUNTRY: Egypt
NATIONALITY: Egyptian
https://www.ubhpbooks.com/books/the-queue/ * http://www.npr.org/2016/05/05/476048221/the-queue-carries-on-a-dystopian-lineage * https://gt.foreignpolicy.com/2016/profile/basma-abdel-aziz?df8f7f5682= * https://www.bookwitty.com/text/heroism-and-anti-heroism-in-five-new-novels-by/57dabc23acd0d072be4d6e2b * https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2016/september/queue-basma-abdel-aziz * https://arablit.org/2015/12/29/basma-abdel-aziz-the-worst-thing-is-that-publishers-are-scared-too/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:M.S., 2005.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, columnist, neuropsychiatrist, and visual artist. Works part time as a counselor at a center in Cairo, Egypt.
AWARDS:Sawiris Cultural Award, General Organisation for Cultural Palaces award, Ahmed Bahaa-Eddin Award.
WRITINGS
Author of nonfiction and fiction books printed in Arabic. Weekly columnist for Egypt’s al-Shorouk newspaper.
SIDELIGHTS
Basra Abdel Aziz is an Egyptian writer and visual artist who started her career as a psychiatric counselor even though she was always interested in the arts as a young person. “I had . . . excellent grades by the end of secondary school, my family refused to let me ‘waste’ it by allowing me to become a sculptor or a musician,” Azia noted in an interview for the Arab Literature Web site, adding: “They said that these hobbies couldn’t be the future: either the faculty of medicine or of engineering.” Aziz went on to earn a master’s degree in neuropsychiatry and to work in a center in Cairo, Egypt, where victims of torture and violence receive counseling.
Aziz chose medicine and psychiatry because, as she noted in the Arab Literature interview: “As I prefer to see people as a whole—not only as a chests, or kidneys, or bones—psychiatry was the magical solution that puts all things together, that cares about the man as one part.” In addition, Azia noted that in her estimation the field of psychiatry was the closest of all the medical fields to the art world. “As art constitutes a reflection of what we are—our conscious and unconscious—I thought that studying psychology and psychiatry would help me in better understanding, better seeing things around me, would also help in deepening my art work, whether in writing, painting or composing music,” Aziz noted in the interview for the Arab Literature Web site.
Aziz is also an activist who has been nicknamed “the Rebel” for her efforts against various forms of injustice as well as torture and corruption in the Middle East. When she attended university, she challenged its administration on issues concerning human rights. She has continued to speak out about human rights and other violations committed by Egyptian leaders who have headed Egypt’s government after the ouster of Hosni Mubarak following the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011. She has been arrested more than once for participating in protests.
Aziz writes a weekly column for Egypt’s al-Shorouk newspaper. She is also a novelist who writes in Arabic. Her novel titled The Queue was translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette. The novel “has drawn comparisons to Western classics like George Orwell’s ‘1984’ and ‘The Trial’ by Franz Kafka,” noted New York Times contributor Alexandra Alter. She added: “It represents a new wave of dystopian and surrealist fiction from Middle Eastern writers who are grappling with the chaotic aftermath and stinging disappointments of the Arab Spring.” Sherif Dhaimish, writing for World Literature Today, noted: “Building on an Egyptian literary dystopic tradition, Basma Abdel Aziz transforms queuing into a metaphor for the pervasive institutional and moral corruption of Egyptian life post-Arab Spring.”
The Queue revolves around an administration in the Middle East that is referred to as “the Gate.” The administration came into power following a revolution that was popularly referred to as “Disgraceful Events.” Almost everything done on a daily basis under the new regime must receive bureaucratic permission, regardless of a person’s socioeconomic status. Meanwhile, citizens are required to line up at the Gate to receive these permissions. The novel introduces readers to a wide range of people who are lined up in the queue as the Gate remains unopened and the people begin sweltering in the Middle East heat. As the novel progresses, readers are presented with “a microcosm of this unknown city’s population,” noted World Literature Today contributor Dhaimish.
The novel features seven sections, with each section beginning with notes from the medical records of Dr. Tarek Fahmy. Tarek records not only accounts of the declining health of a seriously wounded patient named Yehya but also frustrations with the Gate. Tarek quickly begins to understand that he will get little assistance in his efforts to treat Yehya. Meanwhile, Tarek struggles with the realization that his inaction in treating Yehya without permission is, in a sense, making him a collaborator with the repressive regime.
“Aziz’s novel is not simply an exegesis on the state of her homeland, but a much more universal evocation of the relationships between hegemonic power and grassroots dissent,” wrote Globe and Mail Online contributor Pasha Malla. Malla added: “It feels both fitting and faintly tragic that she had to resort to the literature of dark fantasy to convey it.” Calling The Queue “an effective critique of authoritarianism,” NPR: National Public Radio Web site contributor Carmen Maria Machado noted: “The familiarity of the narrative, the banality of collective evil, is the most unsettling element.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
New York Times, May 30, 2016, Alexandra Alter, “From the Seeds of the Arab Spring, a Harvest of Dystopian Fiction,” review of The Queue, p. A1(L).
World Literature Today, September-October, 2016, Sherif Dhaimish, review of The Queue, p. 73.
ONLINE
Arab Literature (in English), https://arablit.org/ (December 29, 2015), “Basma Abdel Aziz: ‘The Worst Thing Is That Publishers Are Scared, Too,’” author interview.
Global Thinkers 2016, https://gt.foreignpolicy.com/ (March 31, 2017), “For Telling an Orwellian Tale,” author profile.
Globe and Mail Online, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/ (June 3, 2016), Pasha Malla, “Review: Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue Is an Evocation of the Ties Between Hegemonic Power and Grassroots Dissent.”
NPR: National Public Radio Web site, http://www.npr.org (May 5, 2016), Carmen Maria Machado, review of The Queue.
World Literature Today, https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org (September 1, 2016), Sherif Dhaimish, review of The Queue.
LC control no.: n 95931276
Personal name heading:
Aziz, Basuni, 1935-
Variant(s): Basuni Aziz, 1935-
Found in: Basuni Aziz, kenangan dari ayah ... 1995: t.p. (Basuni
Aziz) cover , p. 4 (b. in Martapura, Kalimantan Selatan,
6/26/35; memimpin Akademi Keuangan dan Perbankan,
Lembaga Pendidikan Indonesia) THIS IS NOT CORRECT FOR AUTHOR
================================================================================
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BASMA ABDEL AZIZ is an Egyptian writer, psychiatrist, and visual artist. Early on, she earned the nickname ‘the rebel’ for her indefatigable struggle against injustice, torture, and corruption. A weekly columnist for Egypt’s al-Shorouk newspaper, she represents a fresh and necessary female voice in Arabic journalism and fiction. She is the winner of the Sawiris Cultural Award, the General Organisation for Cultural Palaces award, and the Ahmed Bahaa-Eddin Award. She lives in Cairo.
Basma Abdel Aziz
Novelist/Egypt
For telling an Orwellian tale.
To describe military repression in Egypt, psychiatrist and activist Basma Abdel Aziz needed surrealist literature. “Fiction,” Aziz told the New York Times, “gave me a very wide space to say what I wanted to say about totalitarian authority.” Her debut novel, The Queue, published in English this year, is about a Middle Eastern administration called “The Gate,” which assumed power after a revolution known as the “Disgraceful Events.” The Gate must grant citizens permission to undertake basic activities, yet its headquarters remain shut as the line outside grows ever longer. Aziz, who has drawn glowing comparisons to Franz Kafka and George Orwell, told ArabLit.org that she hopes her writing will “help in disclosing games played all the time by different authorities to control people’s lives.” (Photo courtesy of Basma Abdel Aziz)
Notable Facts:
At her university, she was one of only a few women who challenged the administration on human rights. Consequently, she was denied various positions and advancements.
As a child, Aziz loved the artNikeshs but she says her family refused to let her become a sculptor or musician. Instead, she studied psychiatry before writing The Queue.
Clarification, December 15, 2016: Basma was not denied various positions and advancements for refusing to wear a hijab, but rather for challenging the administration on human rights.
Basma Abdel Aziz: ‘The Worst Thing Is That Publishers Are Scared, Too’
By mlynxqualey on December 29, 2015 • ( 6 )
Basma Abdel Aziz — whose novel Al-Tabuur (The Queue) is forthcoming in English translation next year, courtesy of Elisabeth Jaquette and Melville House Press — talked with Rachael Daum about torture, the study of psychology, and why she writes. Abdel Aziz is also the author of the 2014 work Memory of Repression: A Study of the Matrix of Torture:
With Rachael Daum
I understand that while you were at university, you focused your studies in psychiatry; you state in another interview that it is “similar to the world of literature and arts.” What got you interested in psychiatry to begin with? How do you find they are similar to literature and arts?
basmaBasma Abdel Aziz: As a child in school, I used to draw, play piano, write poems, and wanted simply to continue my studies in the faculty of arts. But as I had an excellent grades by the end of secondary school, my family refused to let me “waste” it by allowing me to become a sculptor or a musician. They said that these hobbies couldn’t be the future: either the faculty of medicine or of engineering.
I went to the faculty of medicine and finished the 6 years with high grades, but was still thinking about arts. As I prefer to see people as a whole — not only as a chests, or kidneys, or bones — psychiatry was the magical solution that puts all things together, that cares about the man as one part.
Beside that, psychiatry was the nearest branch to the world of art, and as art constitutes a reflection of what we are — our conscious and unconscious — I thought that studying psychology and psychiatry would help me in better understanding, better seeing things around me, would also help in deepening my art work, whether in writing, painting or composing music (as I was at this time studying composition in the opera house).
I guess I am fond of watching and explaining behaviour, searching for motives, reasons, and exploring what is behind each individual act, what favours a specific reaction and what can push human beings to refuse or accept certain forms of control, and this pushed me in the end to specialize in psychiatry.
You were also one of the only women to refuse wearing hijab at your university when it was controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. Did you find solidarity with other women or men by doing this? What was that experience like?
BAA: Well, this experience was a very stimulating one. Members of Islamic groups in the faculty talked to me not only about wearing hijab, but also about my writing that dealt heavily with women’s rights. They never gave me orders or threats, but tried to convince me to change my behavior. I was headstrong enough to say no, to refuse with a loud voice any trials to make me shut my mouth.
Very few Muslim women (students) were not wearing hijab; it was (and still is) a deeply rooted habit and at that time it was so difficult to find people who would accept ideas about individual freedom that appear in conflict with religion. Some of my friends stood in solidarity with me, but the actual problem was that both the dean of the faculty and the security department stood completely against all that I was doing. They always had their goals and their deals with the Islamists. I went through a number of battles and received punishment many times; they even denied me my post in the faculty for political and security reasons, and I was prevented from becoming a staff member. They most likely were scared to allow me to be in contact with students, spreading among them a rebellious way of thinking.
I also understand that your Master’s is being denied for being “too controversial,” as it is an in-depth analysis of torture. What got you started in that research? What does it mean to you to have it denied — do you hope it will be granted?
BAA: My Master’s degree that was denied is the latest one, not in psychiatry, but in sociology. After finishing the first MS, which was granted, I started to study sociology, got a diploma, and registered for Master’s in a French university named Poitiers. I chose the field of discourse analysis, and the subject I decided to work on was about the discourse of the official religious institute based in Cairo, Al Azhar.
I was looking to analyse the statements of Al Azhar and the speeches of the Sheikh of Al Azhar during the crisis of the Muslim Brotherhood ruling. I left for France but had to return soon after because there were some problems in my governmental job in Cairo. I re-registered for the MS. Here in an Egyptian institute I finished the analysis work in one year, but my Egyptian supervisor refused to discuss the thesis. I guess that the subject looked to him very sensitive, especially considering the results I came out with, which convict both the military institute and the religious institute with abusing their authority. My analysis reveals how the authority represented by the minister of defense used Al Azhar for its sake, and how Al Azhar used religion in achieving this target. It focuses also on how the religious text was directed to reconstruct the consciousness of people and to bring them finally to the side of a military ruling system.
Now, the worst thing is that publishers are scared, too. Many of them refused to publish my thesis after I re-edited it to be a book.
Turning to your writing: your books are often described as dystopian and surrealist. What do you find is effective with this sort of writing? What do you hope to accomplish with it, and what sorts of lasting effects do you hope to see the books have?
thequeueBAA: Yes, my latest novel The Queue is a dystopian one, many readers found in it the spirit of Kafka and Orwell as well. I wrote it about three years ago, after the Egyptian revolution, and I finished it by the end of 2012. The real political scene was at this time unclear, things looked really surrealistic, the Muslim Brotherhood took over authority through apparently fair elections and started to build a distorted religious ruling system. The reality was very hard to believe or to deal with, so that a writer could go so far by his imagination to make a story which would be interesting enough to read.
In all my writing I try to destroy different faces of dictatorship and of totalitarian authority, whether political, social or religious. And as this is a universal not a purely Egyptian case, I think that a dystopian piece, not located in district place and time, with a considerable dose of fantasy, is the best way to express some of my thoughts. I feel it is a convenient way to express a markedly painful situation that we are living in, and I hope it leaves a positive and deep effect on readers who are facing forms of persecution and harassment every day, and who might feel uncomfortable with reading an extremely realistic piece.
I wish to make change, even a small one, with my books, to help in disclosing games played all the time by different authorities to control people’s lives. I hope to add just a few millimeters in the way of gaining our deserved freedom.
You enjoy the luxury (or the curse!) of being able to read your books in English translation. What relationship to you have with the translations, and with Lissie Jaquette, your translator?
BAA: Having may work translated to other languages beside Arabic is a great milestone for me — I would love to receive comments and reactions from people everywhere. I met Elisabeth in Cairo where a common friend introduced my latest novel The Queue to her. She contacted me later on and invited me to discuss the novel with a group of her friends. She told me how much she liked it and offered to work on translation of one chapter, which I welcomed. We became thae friends and she surprised me after months with the news that her translation won the English PEN grant.
Lissie told me also that Melville House is going to publish it, and this was like a dream come true. We collaborated after she finished the translation, and I started to answer her questions about certain points and found it very exciting job, in fact I enjoyed reading her translation while answering, it was a great experience — not only seeing my work in another language but also being able to explore how another person saw it and re-wrote it by his eyes. Lissie is a very helpful and understanding person, at some point I felt she was present with me while writing the novel and I feel we constitute a very successful team.
Editor’s note: The Queue is scheduled for English-language release in May.
Basma Abdel Aziz. The Queue
Sherif Dhaimish
90.5 (September-October 2016): p73.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Basma Abdel Aziz.The Queue. Trans. Elisabeth Jaquette. Brooklyn. Melville House. 2016. 217 pages.
Building on an Egyptian literary dystopic tradition, Basma Abdel Aziz transforms queuing into a metaphor for the pervasive institutional and moral corruption of Egyptian life post-Arab Spring. Crumbling institutions, decaying landscapes, and disarray become the anonymous Middle Eastern city's defining characters as the Gate, with its ironclad grip, drives the country into oblivion.
Egyptian journalist and psychiatrist Aziz is a prolific author of nonfiction and academic writings on the sociopolitical and psychological ramifications of institutionalized repression under Mubarak's regime. Dubbed "The Rebel" for her staunch defense of human rights in the country, Aziz predicted "that the working class will start a revolution" in Temptation of Absolute Power, which was serendipitously released a day before the 25 January Revolution. Aziz distanced herself from the initial euphoria of the Arab Spring, foreseeing the bleak realities underlining the edifice of social solidarity.
In The Queue, citizens must line up at the Gate in order to receive bureaucratic permission for almost all daily activities. However, as the queue swells with people from all walks of life, the Gate refuses to open. In the heat of the Middle Eastern sun, a microcosm of this unknown city's population begins to surface: there's the galabeya -wearing religious fanatic; the motherly Um Mabrouk who provides refreshments and sometimes phone calls for those in the queue; the brother of a security officer killed in the clashes; and then there's Yehya--a young protester whose participation in the Disgraceful Events has left him with a bullet wedged in his abdomen.
Dr. Tarek Fahmy perhaps occupies the most precarious position of them all. The Gate's rigid procedures tie his hands and obstruct him from operating on Yehya's mortal injury. Each of the novel's seven sections begins with notes from his medical record, documenting his declining health and a diminishing chance of assistance from the Gate. Tarek is aware of how close the bullet is to Yehya's organs, yet the fear of breaking the law compromises his ethical duty. As such, he finds himself unwittingly co-opted in the Gate's overarching system of oppression.
Fusing the satirical and fantastical, Aziz reasserts the agency of individuals at a time of potent authoritarianism by confronting the state as a panoptical entity and exploring the psychological effects of the omnipotence of the Gate's gaze.
Unlike classical dystopian literature, the novel is firmly located in a specific spatial and temporal setting. For some non-Egyptians, time may appear interchangeable and it could be anywhere in the Middle East; but realistically, the physical and cultural landscape is distinctly Cairo-esque. Furthermore, the cover's Eye of Horus set against an opaque background of Egyptian falaheen undermines the novel's anonymous setting.
The clichéd literary tropes of the dystopia canon work against Aziz's narrative, forging a story that is all but too familiar. The narrative's linear structure lacks the abstract ambiguity and thematic complexity that is distinguishingly Kafkaesque. Its inability to probe beyond the superficial and delve into the interiority of its characters makes the novel little more than a well-written piece of fictive social critique.
Sherif Dhaimish
London
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dhaimish, Sherif. "Basma Abdel Aziz. The Queue." World Literature Today, vol. 90, no. 5, 2016, p. 73+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461680568&it=r&asid=fbf88619ca096a5872e8466320fafd81. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A461680568
From the Seeds of the Arab Spring, a Harvest of Dystopian Fiction
Alexandra Alter
(May 30, 2016): Business News: pA1(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Basma Abdel Aziz was walking in downtown Cairo one morning when she saw a long line of people standing in front of a closed government building.
Returning hours later, Ms. Abdel Aziz, a psychiatrist who counsels torture victims, passed the same people still waiting listlessly -- a young woman and an elderly man, a mother holding her baby. The building remained closed.
When she got home, she immediately started writing about the people in line and didn't stop for 11 hours. The story became her surreal debut novel, ''The Queue,'' which takes place after a failed revolution in an unnamed Middle Eastern city. The narrative unfolds over 140 days, as civilians are forced to wait in an endless line to petition a shadowy authority called The Gate for basic services.
''Fiction gave me a very wide space to say what I wanted to say about totalitarian authority,'' Ms. Abdel Aziz said in a recent interview.
''The Queue,'' which was just published in English by Melville House, has drawn comparisons to Western classics like George Orwell's ''1984'' and ''The Trial'' by Franz Kafka. It represents a new wave of dystopian and surrealist fiction from Middle Eastern writers who are grappling with the chaotic aftermath and stinging disappointments of the Arab Spring.
Five years after the popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere, a bleak, apocalyptic strain of post-revolutionary literature has taken root in the region. Some writers are using science fiction and fantasy tropes to describe grim current political realities. Others are writing about controversial subjects like sexuality and atheism, or exhuming painful historical episodes that were previously off limits.
In a literary culture where poetry has long been the most celebrated medium, writers are experimenting with a range of genres and styles, including comics and graphic novels, hallucinatory horror novels and allegorical works of science fiction.
''There's a shift away from realism, which has dominated Arabic literature,'' said the Kuwait-born novelist Saleem Haddad, whose new book, ''Guapa,'' is narrated by a young gay Arab man whose friend has been imprisoned after a political revolt. ''What's coming to the surface now is darker and a bit deeper.''
Science fiction and surrealism have long provided an escape valve for writers living under oppressive regimes. In Latin America, decades of fascism and civil war helped inspire masterpieces of magical realism from authors like Gabriel Garca Marquez and Isabel Allende. In Russia, the postmodern novelist Vladimir Sorokin has published disturbing and controversial futuristic novels that surreptitiously skewer the country's repressive government.
Dystopian themes are not entirely new in Arabic fiction. But they have become much more prominent in recent years, publishers and translators say. The genre has proliferated in part because it captures the sense of despair that many writers say they feel in the face of cyclical violence and repression. At the same time, futuristic settings may give writers some measure of cover to explore charged political ideas without being labeled dissidents.
''These futuristic stories are all about lost utopia,'' said Layla al-Zubaidi, co-editor of a collection of post-Arab Spring writing titled ''Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution.'' ''People really could imagine a better future, and now it's almost worse than it was before.''
In the turbulent months after the uprisings, when the promises of democracy and greater social freedom remained elusive, some novelists channeled their frustrations and fears into grim apocalyptic tales. In Mohammed Rabie's gritty novel ''Otared,'' which will be published in English this year by the American University in Cairo, a former Egyptian police officer joins a fight against a mysterious occupying power that rules the country in 2025.
Mr. Rabie said he wrote the novel in response to the ''successive defeats'' that advocates of democracy faced after the 2011 demonstrations that ended President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule. While there are parallels to present-day Egyptian society, setting the story in the near future allowed him to write more freely, without drawing explicit connections to Egypt's current ruler, he said in an email interview translated by his Arabic publisher.
Nael Eltoukhy, whose darkly satirical 2013 novel, ''Women of Karantina,'' takes place partly in a crime-ridden Alexandria in the year 2064, said he felt that a futuristic farce was the best way to reflect the jaded mood in Egypt.
''In Egypt, especially after the revolution, everything is terrible, but everything is also funny,'' he said in an interview. ''Now, I think it's worse than the time of Mubarak.''
Gloomy futuristic stories have proved popular with readers, and several of these novels have been critical and commercial hits. ''Otared'' was a finalist for this year's prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction.
Publishers say the books have caught on with the public in part because they distill a collective feeling of frustration.
This new body of post-revolutionary literature shows a sharp tonal shift from the ecstatic outpouring that arrived immediately after the Arab Spring, when many writers published breathless memoirs or dug out old manuscripts they had stashed away for years.
Celebrated Egyptian novelists like Ahdaf Soueif and Mona Prince wrote firsthand nonfiction accounts of the 2011 protests in Tahrir Square. The Syrian novelist Samar Yazbek published diaries she kept during the Syrian uprising. A new generation of writers drew inspiration from the stunning scenes of citizens rising up together against entrenched dictatorships.
''There was something about the experience of the revolution where suddenly you had a voice, and your voice had weight and it had meaning,'' said Yasmine el-Rashidi, an Egyptian journalist whose first novel, ''Chronicle of a Last Summer,'' about a young woman's political awakening in Cairo during and after Mr. Mubarak's rule, will be published in the United States next month.
In the years since the revolution, that optimism has withered, and the authorities have cracked down on creative expression across the region. In Saudi Arabia, the poet Ashraf Fayadh was sentenced to death last year for his verses, which religious authorities called blasphemous. After an international outcry, his sentence was reduced to eight years in prison and 800 lashes.
In Egypt, under the strict rule of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the government has shut art galleries, raided publishing houses and confiscated copies of books it views as controversial. Last year, customs officers seized 400 copies of ''Walls of Freedom,'' about Egyptian political street art, and charged that the book was ''instigating revolt.''
''We are concerned now with what we publish,'' said Sherif-Joseph Rizk, director of Dar al-Tanweer Egypt, an Arabic publishing house. ''If something is banned, it does create commercial problems.''
Despite explicit protections for free speech in Egypt's 2014 Constitution, the authorities have targeted individual writers and artists. The novelist Ahmed Naji is serving a two-year prison sentence for violating ''public modesty'' with sexually explicit passages in his experimental novel ''The Use of Life.'' Many fear that his imprisonment will lead to more self-censorship.
''The Arab Spring and the revolution broke people's fears and gave them the initiative to express themselves,'' said Ms. Abdel Aziz, whose novel, ''The Queue,'' was published in Arabic in 2013. ''Now we are back to oppression.''
Ms. Abdel Aziz, 39, earned a master's degree in neuropsychiatry in 2005 and now works part time at a center in Cairo that counsels victims of torture and violence. She has published two short-story collections and several nonfiction books on sensitive subjects like torture and the human rights violations committed by Egyptian security forces.
But after Mr. Mubarak's fall, writing a factual account felt like an inadequate way to capture the surreal experience of ordinary Egyptians who lived through the uprisings and subsequent crackdowns, she said. Instead, she aimed to write a universal story that reflected what was unfolding around her but transcended geography and current events.
She started writing ''The Queue'' in September 2012. The novel follows a young salesman, Yehya, who was shot during a failed uprising. Yehya is denied medical treatment and forced to wait in an endless line to petition The Gate for a permit to have surgery. As he grows weaker, the line only gets longer, stretching on for miles.
Ms. Abdel Aziz uses coded language for loaded political terms and events throughout the novel, which was translated by Elisabeth Jaquette. The 2011 uprising against Mr. Mubarak is called ''the First Storm.'' A later civilian revolt that ended in bloodshed is referred to as ''the Disgraceful Events.''
Ms. Abdel Aziz worries about the growing scrutiny Egyptian writers and activists face. About a dozen of her friends are in prison, she said. She has been arrested three times for taking part in demonstrations and protests. But she feels that living in fear is futile.
''I'm not afraid anymore,'' she said. ''I will not stop writing.''
CAPTION(S):
PHOTOS: ''The Queue'' is part of a wave of bleak, surrealist novels by Middle Eastern writers. (A1); Basma Abdel Aziz said that fiction let her ''say what I wanted to say about totalitarian authority.'' (PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD PERRY/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (B5)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Alter, Alexandra. "From the Seeds of the Arab Spring, a Harvest of Dystopian Fiction." New York Times, 30 May 2016, p. A1(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453956637&it=r&asid=a7746e80d803988d95c960ffb2073bb9. Accessed 28 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A453956637
'The Queue' Carries On A Dystopian Lineage
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May 5, 20167:00 AM ET
Carmen Maria Machado
The Queue
The Queue
by Basma Abdel Aziz
Paperback, 224 pages
purchase
In an unspecified Middle Eastern city, a doctor is drawn to and troubled by a particular patient file. The file documents the injuries of a man named Yehya, sustained after a skirmish called the Disgraceful Events. Not only are the events shrouded in mystery; Yehya himself does not know who shot him. And the doctor would have already removed the bullet, except for the fact that in that aftermath of the Disgraceful Events, the government has made it illegal to do so without a certain permit. Yehya must get that permit so the doctor can do the surgery. To get the permit, he must go to the Gate. To go to the Gate, he must enter the titular queue.
The people of this city have been joining the queue ever since the Disgraceful Events, but it never moves or dissipates. It simply grows and grows farther and farther away from the Gate, kilometers long, out of sight. The citizens have their own reasons for being there: A woman whose daughter died because of the bureaucratic red tape is attempting to save her other child; a man whose security officer cousin died during the Disgraceful Events seeks recognition for his sacrifice; a journalist is trying to piece together the truth. And Yehya must get his permit, to save his life.
A whole community springs up around the queue: systems of barter and trade, gossip and deals. A mysterious telecommunications company gives away free phones, and surveillance — and disappearances — begin. Newspapers are replaced by a single paper called The Truth. Decrees and laws rain down from the Gate. Faith is weaponized against the people. Polls of the population in regards to their government are allegedly unanimous in their support, and thus abandoned entirely. Yehya's colleague Amani risks everything to enter the official government hospital to get her hands on a crucial X-ray — and pays a terrible price. And throughout, Yehya grows weaker and weaker, the people around him more desperate, and the government more oppressive and evasive.
The Queue's regime's attempt to rewrite reality — to propagandize, shift blame, and then alter the truth entirely — is particularly chilling in the face of Yehya's slow-moving injury. The bullet in his body is evidence of the government's role during the Disgraceful Events, yes, but more than that, it is unmistakably real. It is lodged in his guts, gradually killing him, and no amount of Orwellian double-speak ("It urged citizens not to be misled by what they had seen, no matter how confident they were in the accuracy of their vision") or re-creation of events can alter that fact.
'The Queue' is the newest in this genre of totalitarian absurdity: helpless citizens — some hopeful, some hopeless — struggling against an opaque, sinister government.
Even after the regime gets to Amani — whose punishment is one of the most disconcerting scenes in the novel — Yehya will not be persuaded. "She tried to convince Yehya, that the bullet that had pierced his side and lodged itself in his pelvis was a fake bullet, and it wasn't important to remove it, and that he no longer needed to trouble himself with who had shot him," Aziz writes. "But Yehya was not convinced, and he did not stop bleeding."
There are echoes of many other books in The Queue, which was translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette: Vladimir Sorokin's novel of the same name, which pokes fun at endless Soviet lines; Kafka's The Trial, Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, all of which have a shared, surreal vision of an impenetrable, dystopian bureaucracy and government overreach, where simple tasks are obfuscated by paperwork and formal processes not meant to be breached.
And so The Queue is the newest in this genre of totalitarian absurdity: helpless citizens — some hopeful, some hopeless — struggling against an opaque, sinister government, whose decrees, laws, propaganda, and red tape would be comical if they weren't so deadly serious. Here, the novel seems to be nodding toward the political unrest after the Arab Spring as a real-life analog, but it could be any number of other conflicts, cultures, or periods of history with only minor variations.
And that, ultimately, is what makes The Queue such an effective critique of authoritarianism. The familiarity of the narrative, the banality of collective evil, is the most unsettling element. People — for, no matter the euphemism, the force behind Big Brother and the Gate and real-life totalitarian governments is just people — will always find a way to control other people in one way or another, should it suit them. Perhaps with the publication of The Queue, the lesson will begin to finally sink in.
Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, will be released in 2017. She has written for The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta and elsewhere.
The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz
FICTION
Author:
Basma Abdel Aziz
Translator:
Elisabeth Jaquette
The cover to The Queue by Basma Abdel AzizBrooklyn. Melville House. 2016. 217 pages.
Building on an Egyptian literary dystopic tradition, Basma Abdel Aziz transforms queuing into a metaphor for the pervasive institutional and moral corruption of Egyptian life post–Arab Spring. Crumbling institutions, decaying landscapes, and disarray become the anonymous Middle Eastern city’s defining characters as the Gate, with its ironclad grip, drives the country into oblivion.
Egyptian journalist and psychiatrist Aziz is a prolific author of nonfiction and academic writings on the sociopolitical and psychological ramifications of institutionalized repression under Mubarak’s regime. Dubbed “The Rebel” for her staunch defense of human rights in the country, Aziz predicted “that the working class will start a revolution” in Temptation of Absolute Power,which was serendipitously released a day before the 25 January Revolution. Aziz distanced herself from the initial euphoria of the Arab Spring, foreseeing the bleak realities underlining the edifice of social solidarity.
In The Queue, citizens must line up at the Gate in order to receive bureaucratic permission for almost all daily activities. However, as the queue swells with people from all walks of life, the Gate refuses to open. In the heat of the Middle Eastern sun, a microcosm of this unknown city’s population begins to surface: there’s the galabeya-wearing religious fanatic; the motherly Um Mabrouk who provides refreshments and sometimes phone calls for those in the queue; the brother of a security officer killed in the clashes; and then there’s Yehya—a young protester whose participation in the Disgraceful Events has left him with a bullet wedged in his abdomen.
Dr. Tarek Fahmy perhaps occupies the most precarious position of them all. The Gate’s rigid procedures tie his hands and obstruct him from operating on Yehya’s mortal injury. Each of the novel’s seven sections begins with notes from his medical record, documenting his declining health and a diminishing chance of assistance from the Gate. Tarek is aware of how close the bullet is to Yehya’s organs, yet the fear of breaking the law compromises his ethical duty. As such, he finds himself unwittingly co-opted in the Gate’s overarching system of oppression.
Fusing the satirical and fantastical, Aziz reasserts the agency of individuals at a time of potent authoritarianism by confronting the state as a panoptical entity and exploring the psychological effects of the omnipotence of the Gate’s gaze.
Unlike classical dystopian literature, the novel is firmly located in a specific spatial and temporal setting. For some non-Egyptians, time may appear interchangeable and it could be anywhere in the Middle East; but realistically, the physical and cultural landscape is distinctly Cairo-esque. Furthermore, the cover’s Eye of Horus set against an opaque background of Egyptian falaheen undermines the novel’s anonymous setting.
The clichéd literary tropes of the dystopia canon work against Aziz’s narrative, forging a story that is all but too familiar. The narrative’s linear structure lacks the abstract ambiguity and thematic complexity that is distinguishingly Kafkaesque. Its inability to probe beyond the superficial and delve into the interiority of its characters makes the novel little more than a well-written piece of fictive social critique.
Sherif Dhaimish
London
Review: Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue is an evocation of the ties between hegemonic power and grassroots dissent
Pasha Malla
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Jun. 03, 2016 10:00AM EDT
Last updated Monday, Jun. 06, 2016 11:13AM EDT
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Title The Queue
Author Basma Abdel Aziz, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
Publisher Melville House
Pages 224
Price $20.95
Around the turn of the century, American literature got magical. Writers such as Aimee Bender, Judy Budnitz, George Saunders, Kelly Link and others – many of them wonderful – all appeared at once with stories about fairies, ghosts and unlikely medical abnormalities. Here’s the opening of Bender’s story Marzipan, from her 1998 collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: “One week after his father died, my father woke up with a hole in his stomach.… You could now see behind him like he was an enlarged peephole.” And so forth.
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These were the Bill Clinton years, an era of relative comfort for the privileged classes – including many of the people who were producing and reading these books – which in post-9/11, post-collapse retrospect feels a little naive. That fabulism would emerge amid this climate echoes John Barth’s championing of postmodernism as a “literature of exhaustion”; if those late-nineties flights of fancy weren’t all David Foster Wallace reckoning with the inanities of neo-liberalism, on the cusp of the millenium many seemed to be simply pursuing something new.
Whatever the motivation, it was a bit of an odd trend; in the 20th century, most literary turns toward magical thinking were inspired by persecution. Whether the supernatural offered an escape from or an articulation of trauma, writers responded to tyranny and terror with everything from the absurdist tales of early Soviet writers such as Daniil Kharms and Mikhail Bulgakov to the magic realism of the Latin American boom.
As Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier wrote of his contemporaries, “We have forged a language appropriate to the expression of our realities,” a language that did not seek to divorce itself from lived existence, but to capture its struggles through surrealism, expressionism, the baroque and the grotesque. Carpentier preferred the term “the marvellous real” to describe his fiction, which, as is too often the case with writer-dissidents who speak out against repressive regimes, landed him in jail and forced his eventual exile.
Since 2011, much of the fiction in response to the Arab Spring has gone a similar route, tending toward dystopian satires (Nihad Sirees’s The Silence and the Roar and Nael Eltoukhy’s Women of Karantina) more akin to the avant-garde social critiques of Vladimir Sorokin than the historical epics of Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Basma Abdel Aziz’s debut novel even name-checks Sorokin’s The Queue; both are about an interminable lineup and the people in it, and both offer scathing critiques of the dehumanization of their respective societies.
Abdel Aziz, a psychiatrist by training, has published several works of political non-fiction and is well known in Egypt as an outspoken voice against injustice. The source of that injustice in her first novel is the Gate, a hegemonic shadow organization that sits, doors closed, at the head of the book’s titular queue, which has grown so large that it requires service by two buses: one to the end, and one to the beginning. The book is structured around the story of Yehya Gad el-Rab Saeed, who has been shot while protesting the Gate’s activities. In order to have the bullet removed, he is required to have his status as a True Citizen verified – naturally, by the Gate – so he waits, slowly bleeding out, in line.
Aside from its allegorical resonances, what’s most compelling about The Queue is the destabilization created by filtering specific political events through the lens of fiction. Most English-language readers, certainly, are accustomed to our dystopias along the Orwell-Huxley-Atwood axis, which extrapolate worst-case end results from current social circumstances. Retroactively reimagining the events of and after the protests in Tahrir Square as a speculative novel accentuates their horrors: There’s a disturbing irony at play when these unimaginable “speculations” have actually happened.
Along with this doubling effect of truth and fiction, the book operates within a number of similar binaries. Among the members of the queue are, on one side of the political spectrum, a religious zealot known only as “the man in the galabeya” (a traditional, robe-like Egyptian garment) and Shalaby, the state-sympathetic cousin of a murdered member of the Quell Force; on the other are “the woman with the short hair,” who spearheads a boycott of the telecommunications company whose complimentary cellphones double as surveillance devices, and Um Mabrouk, who begins campaigning for reform after her child dies due to medical negligence.
The tension between these groups is focused in the space of what actually occurred and what is emerging as the historical record – at least as it’s reported by the perversely named newspaper The Truth, which has reconfigured the protests as “the Disgraceful Events” and claims that the ensuing violence was “a conspiracy hatched by some cowardly foreigners.” Though even these accounts shift per the Gate’s various agendas, until a version emerges that, while completely divorced from actuality, is so demoralizing that many citizens accept its inventions as fact.
The details of The Queue are appallingly familiar to anyone who has followed the social breakdown in Egypt over the past five years – manipulation of the media, “disappearances” of suspected insubordinates, clandestine surveillance and an insidious conflation of church and state. But Basma Abdel Aziz’s novel is not simply an exegesis on the state of her homeland, but a much more universal evocation of the relationships between hegemonic power and grassroots dissent. It feels both fitting and faintly tragic that she had to resort to the literature of dark fantasy to convey it.