Al-Ahram Weekly, Egypt
March 24-30 2005
The lodgers’ discontent
Yasmine Fathi registers the effect of a bestselling novel on a
downtown apartment building
In one of the most restless parts of Cairo — 34 Talaat Harb Street,
to be precise — residents of the by now famous Yaqoubian Building
had been idling away the years in relative oblivion, unaware of the
media attention Alaa El-Aswani’s eponymous bestselling novel was
about to force on them. “It’s a novel of which the hero is a place,”
the author explains. When they are turned into films to be shot on
location — written by Wahid Hamed and directed by his son Marwan,
The Yaqoubian Building, said to be the biggest production to date in
Egyptian cinema, will star such household names as Adel Imam and Nour
El-Sherif — the hullabaloo such novels can generate is evidently
irksome.
“But this has precedents,” El-Aswani goes on, all too aware of the
negative impact the film has made on the residents in question: “A
novel about the River Drina by the Yugoslav author Ivo Andric, for
example; also a good half of Naguib Mahfouz’s work — Sugar Street,
Meddaq Alley…”
The choice of downtown Cairo, he says, has its roots in his
upbringing: “That’s where I’m from — its upper middle-class
echelons. So it’s where I grew up, attending the Lycée Français.
Traditional, grassroots neighbourhoods make up the world of Naguib
Mahfouz, downtown Cairo makes up mine.” He first came to know the
building, he recounts, through his father’s office — later
transformed into his own dentistry practice — one of its flats: “It
also has a striking name that attracts attention. But it must be
noted that, in the novel, the building is a technical device, nothing
more.”
Yet, as the responses of both historical and recently arrived lodgers
show, even a technical device can prove profoundly problematic: “We
are talking about people whose place of residence no one has heard
of, and suddenly there are cameras and two to three interviews a
day.”
And notwithstanding the fact that two other Yaqoubian buildings exist
— one in Heliopolis, one in Beirut — both hullabaloo and negative
response have invested this one with a peculiar sense of importance.
According to lawyer Fikry Abdel-Malek, the agent of the building
since 1961, Nishan Yaqoubian, an Armenian, had the six-story
construction built in the 1930s; the bottom floor, Abdel-Malek adds,
consisted of the Yaqoubian’s huge silverware store. In the 1940s
ownership of the building was transferred to Dekran, Nishan’s son:
“The building was occupied by Armenian, Italian, and Greek lodgers as
well as prominent Egyptian figures.”
The latter have included Zaher Abdel-Rahman, governor of Marsa
Matruh, Mahmoud Talaat, governor of Damietta, and the famous actor
Zaki Rostom. The Yaqoubian family divide their time between Egypt and
Switzerland, and this is why it has been in the care of Abdel-Malek
for over 40 years: “Dekran and I maintained contact throughout this
time — until one day I received a furious call from him about the
book… I hadn’t heard of it, so I bought it and started reading it.
I was appalled.”
In contrast to the gritty realism with which El-Aswani imbues the
building, older lodgers remember it in glowing terms. “In the old
days,” one Greek resident who would rather remain anonymous
reminisced, “the building was very elegant — beautiful. I inherited
the apartment from my father, and I’ve been living here since 1962.”
She has not yet read the book, but she has “heard rumours” that it
speaks disparagingly of her neighbours: “Which is wrong. This has
always been a clean building, with a spick-and-span reputation.”
Magdi Shaker, an Egyptian who has lived in the building for the last
12 years, agrees: “The author might claim that all he says is the
product of his imagination. Well, he should realise that this
imagination of his has hurt a lot of people…” Drugs, prostitution,
women discussing sex on the roof — according to Abdel-Malek, all
this undermines the reputation of the building: “El-Aswani gathered
every social disease into our lodgings.”
Yet, to listen to him speak, at least, such was far from the author’s
intention. “Some residents,” he explains, “spotted similarities
between themselves and the characters, and so they decided to take
both me and the production company to court. It’s terribly silly.
None of the characters in the book are real, it’s a work of fiction
in which I’ve used my imagination, for I am a writer,” he exclaims,
“and this is what writers do.”
Many however believe they have plenty of evidence that El- Aswani was
depicting them in person. Abdel-Malek, for example, believes the
character Fikry Abdel-Shaheed to be him: “He is the agent of the
Yaqoubian Building; everyone knows I’m the agent of the Yaqoubian
Building. All that El-Aswani changed is half of my last name. And he
says that I’m an alcoholic womaniser who would do anything for money
— there goes my reputation.” (In response to this line of thinking,
El- Aswani points out that there were four lawyers in the building,
all named Fikry. “Nor did I mean any one of them, as it happens.”)
Yet such characters as Zaki El-Desouqi and Hatem Rasheed, Abdel-Malak
insists, are similarly libelled.
For their part Yasser and Rami Khela believe the character Malaak to
be identical with their late father. The brothers were aware that
El-Aswani was writing a book on the building, but had paid little
attention at the time. “Until one day,” Yasser recounts, “I read a
newspaper review of the book and found my father’s name in it — a
sleazy opportunist, apparently.” Nor is there any doubt about the
character’s identity: “He had the gall to use the full name, Malaak
Khela, and he described him as a tailor, which he was.”
According to the elder brother, Rami, Malaak Khela had at one point
shared an apartment with Zaki El-Desouqi and Alaa El-Aswani: “Each
had a room, which was turned into an office.” Disputes erupted, he
recounts, when, in 1989, El-Aswani decided to take over the reception
area as well as his room, building a wall around it to prevent the
other two from claiming it: “My father sued him and we’ve been
enemies ever since.”
The character, the brothers believe, was conceived by way of revenge.
“He basically says that our father performed illegal activities,”
Rami explains, “that he was the kind of person who could sell his
mother…” One anecdote they find particularly enraging: In the book
Malaak fabricates a Christian Science Monitor article about “a great
Egyptian tailor” and puts it up on the wall. “This article exists,”
Yasser explains. “It is real, it was published, and my father did put
it up on the wall of his office.”
Typically, El-Aswani downplays the similarities between the two
Malaaks, pointing out that the name of Rami and Yasser’s father was
Malaak Makhael and that he was widely known as Mikha: “Maybe Khela is
their fourth or fifth name — it’s a fact of which I had no
awareness.” And rather than being a tailor, he claims, Khela senior
owned a factory. Though he concedes that there was a legal dispute
between him and Malaak, El-Aswani insists their relationship remained
strong.
“Besides,” he adds, “there was another Malaak who worked in the
ground-floor shop — why should they assume that I mean their
father?”
Nor is this all they assume, indeed: other family members are
similarly defamed. “The character Malaak just happens to have a nasty
brother called Abskharon,” says Yasser. “What a coincidence that my
uncle’s name is also Abskharon.” The brothers are deeply upset by the
book. “What do I tell my friends?” asks Rami. “How do I face fellow
merchants? Should people avoid arguing with authors for fear of being
defamed in their books?” And Yasser agrees: “My mother has not
stopped crying since she heard the news. My father was a respectable
man, widely loved. He really does not deserve any of this.”
As a writer of fiction, however, El-Aswani contends, he cannot be
held accountable for people’s reputations: “If I was writing a
documentary about the building and I made up stories then I could be
held responsible. But this is not a documentary.”
His belief is that the Khela brothers are suing him for the sake of
money: “It’s when they found out that the movie is costing LE18
million that they thought of suing me for LE2 million; maybe they
think I’m getting all the money. No one has the right to get into a
writer’s head, making assumptions about his intentions. This way no
one will ever write again.”
Yet Abdel-Malek and the Khela brothers are already in the process of
having El-Aswani prosecuted for libel. And the book’s being turned
into a major commercial venture has contributed to the tenor of their
rhetoric: “I have sent warnings to the director, producer and the
Ministry of Culture,” Rami declaims. “And unless they change that
character’s name and are willing to protect my father’s reputation, I
will not allow this movie to be made — over my dead body.”
–Boundary_(ID_a4JFiYR1w7Y12J4ynm+KTA)–