Papa Sartre: A Modern Arabic Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) (5 page)

She was from Paris, she said, then turned to leave. Her words were like a revelation to him, a gift falling from the sky. He caught up with her and wouldn’t let her go. “You must be an associate of Sartre’s, aren’t you?” he asked her, “Are you related to him?” The thin blonde girl was surprised. She had never heard the name Sartre. She shook her shoulders in astonishment as she looked at the face of the man sinking into his black coat between the white collar and the scarf.

“Oh! You do not know Sartre! Sheikh Hani Halil wrote a response to his work in three volumes, entitled,
The obliterating and crushing response to the straying Jean son of Paul son of Sartre.”

She inquired, extremely amused, “Who is this Sheikh?”

Surprised, Abd al-Rahman wondered aloud, “Oh! You do not know Sheikh Hani Halil either! He’s a famous scholar. He was a student at Najaf, who nearly caused a diplomatic incident between France and Iraq with his book.”

The truth of the matter was that Abd al-Rahman was enamored of the great French philosopher and his philosophy but never managed to meet him during his stay in Paris. He had seen Sartre a few times on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, in the Latin Quarter, at the Sorbonne, at the Café Nîme in Montparnasse, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and browsing through books displayed on the quay of the Seine. Abd al-Rahman was intimidated by Sartre, feared him, and every time he got close to the philosopher, he trembled with fear and left without speaking to him.

There were reasons for this fear. One was that Abd al-Rahman’s French was not strong enough to allow him to engage in any kind of debate with the philosopher. During his stay in Paris he failed to master the language, despite serious efforts to learn it. He could only discuss general topics and had difficulty reading literary and philosophical texts. His professor at the university strongly advised him to master French, explaining that he would not be able to study French philosophy with a weak and shaky comprehension of the language.

He saw in the skinny girl a conversation partner, one with whom he could discuss philosophy as much as he liked, the same way he boasted to the prostitutes who visited his apartment. They were not at all concerned with the veracity or quality of his arguments. He was mistaken in thinking that Germaine believed him when, at the end of their steamy sexual encounters
during which he demonstrated his virility, he would tell her that he was nauseated.

Everything around him made him feel the meaninglessness of existence and thus nauseated him. Feverish lovemaking with the girl made him sick. The piece of red steak he gluttonously ate and washed down with red wine made him sick. As did the high-quality cigarettes he avidly smoked. His wanderings in the Bois de Boulogne, the easy pleasures of the Latin Quarter, the x-rated movies in Saint-Michel, shiny shoes, silk neckties, and strong perfumes—everything made him sick.

Despite her very modest education, the girl he befriended was not fooled by his declarations. She had vast experience in life. She could not believe that a person who devoured life as he did would experience what the foolish philosophers were calling nausea. But she pretended to believe him and his philosophy, his madness and his stupidities. Sometimes at the end of their lovemaking, as she slipped out of bed and put on her bright red slip, she would admit to feeling funny. She described it as a strange feeling, something she never experienced before, something like nausea.

Abd al-Rahman returned to Baghdad for good in the early sixties, accompanied by his French wife and justifying his life as a philosopher without a degree. He was warmly welcomed and supported by his country’s intellectuals, to whom he declared that it did not make sense to have a degree in a senseless world, a phrase that became famous. Someone in his entourage would speculate, “With or without a degree, was Sartre a philosopher?” This scene had taken place on a very hot summer evening his first year home from Paris. He was at the Café Brazil with Salman al-Safi and Abbas Philosophy. The two men got very excited, overturned their chairs, and shouted their approval of this extraordinary philosophical phrase. The philosopher moved them deeply with his appearance and intoxicated them with his philosophical features.

Abbas Philosophy and Salman became the most important intellectuals of the sixties. Abbas came to Baghdad from Kirkuk, after a career in the petroleum industry, to start his career as a poet. Because rhymed poetry posed a problem for him, he championed free verse and followed in the footsteps of an entire generation. At that time he used to call Sartre “Kaka Sartre.” Salman came from al-Shatra, with a small sum of money, to study at Baghdad University. He was like many country people who move to the city, dark-skinned and timid, motivated by dreams of relationships with the most beautiful girls in town, chosen from the bourgeoisie to overcome a psychological gap. If they failed to establish such a relation due to their inexperience, gaucherie, and lack of qualifications, they would invent one in their imaginations and nourish their dreams with love disputes, neurotic fights, tears, and submission. Once those delusions thinned, they’d encounter reality and run away, accusing the girl—to whom they had never spoken—of betrayal and deception and accuse her family of committing social discrimination, and of having a disgusting bourgeois mentality and sickening aristocratic airs.

Salman left the university and found a job as an assistant tailor in Hassoun al-Hindi’s boutique on al-Rashid Street, near al-Zawraa cinema. He planned to devote time to writing a major novel condemning the feudal system in the Muntafik brigade.

The young Iraqi intellectuals celebrated the great philosophy of existentialism, the subject of articles by Suhail Idris in
al-Adab
journal since the fifties and by Abd al-Rahman Badawi in
al-Katib al-‘arabi
since the forties. Iraqi intellectuals became acquainted with that philosophy after the Second World War in the Waqwaq café, near the Olympic Club in Antar Square. Abd al-Rahman returned from Paris in the sixties and told Iraqis about his personal experiences and what he had learned of that philosophy. He rented an elegant house for his French wife in
Mahallet al-Sadriya and became the uncontested existential philosopher. He was renowned in the Arab World and even received an invitation from Suhail Idris to write articles on existentialism for
al-Adab
, the most famous Arab existentialist journal of the time. I never found the letter sent by Idris and also signed by his wife Aida among the manuscripts I have, though when I met them at the restaurant in al-Camp both Salman and Abbas assured me that they had read the letter. Abd al-Rahman arrogantly declined Suhail Idris’s invitation on the grounds that his philosophical thinking occurred in French and he was unable to translate it into Arabic.

The truth is that Abd al-Rahman was unable to write in French or Arabic. His thinking was disorganized, and he was unable to express his feelings in either language. His education was superficial and not derived from books. It was the same education that characterized most of the intellectuals of his generation; it consisted of hours in the morning spent talking, playing dominos, and smoking a water pipe at the café, going to the movies in the afternoon to stretch lazily on the comfortable chairs, and spending evenings drinking and gambling in bars. They only knew the titles of books and what had been written in newspaper reviews. With words they built up kingdoms and knocked down others, ruined reputations, while in their own lives they were unable to carry out what they planned, change their realities, or even comprehend their own environment.

Abd al-Rahman’s argument against writing was, in fact, quite valid, an existentially reasonable argument. He claimed that whoever writes finds something worthwhile, a meaningful life, and expects some financial reward. “How could I then go on believing in a meaningless world?” he would ask. People hailed this concept, and a whole generation of intellectuals did not write because they didn’t want to be part of this false, deceptive world, they didn’t want to be cheated, they didn’t want to be
part of the complex imposed by colonialism, reactionaries, and the ungrateful.

The truth was totally different. Abd al-Rahman was unable to spend hours sitting at a desk to write or even to lie on his stomach on the floor. On the other hand, he liked reading because reading was like dreaming. He used to go over the first few lines of a text and forget the world around him, totally lost in his thoughts. He would start pacing back and forth in his room, get dressed, and roam aimlessly in the streets of the city, dreaming of the words he had read or of the words he intended to say.

Abd al-Rahman found talking to be both soothing and entertaining. Conversation kept him company and pleased him because words, as most of his companions discovered, are like thoughts in their potential to signify meaning. They conform to every aspect of awareness. This is so because the speaker begins the process of thinking the instant he utters a word. At that moment he’s enthusiastic and powerful—or perhaps he is a doubter or denier. Writing is different, a distinct form, far removed from spoken words. It distances itself from emotional reactions. It’s like masturbation. It represents a feel for the image but not the image itself, while spoken words are, at the very least, an agreement between the image and the object, between the moment and the reaction, the thought and the soul. When Abd al-Rahman speaks, he allows his words to float freely while he feels a kind of purification or numbness. The words he utters and the feelings he experiences evaporate. Thoughts that struggle in his mind fly away. This is how Abd al-Rahman used to talk, because spoken words offered him a true nihilism, not an approximation, a realistic philosophy rather than figurative thinking. In short, Abd al-Rahman was a speaker not a writer; he was a philosopher not a scoundrel.

Ismail Hadoub asked him one day, “What about Sartre? Why does he write?” and closed his eyes to await the philosopher’s
response. Abd al-Rahman replied, also with closed eyes, and like a prophet, and said, “Sartre is one thing and we are something else. What is given to Sartre is not given to anyone else. Sartre writes to have his books translated into Arabic so that we may read them. Otherwise, pray tell, if Sartre did not write, how could we have heard of him? Sartre is something else,” he said as he was walking with Ismail Hadoub on a very cold winter night, down al-Rashid Street near the Haydar Khana mosque. They were soon joined by the turbaned men who emerged from the large wooden gates of the mosque. They crowded the narrow sidewalk near the metal ramp, decorated with Islamic designs and blue enamel. Abd al-Rahman crossed to the other side of the street once he spotted this swarm of white turbans, gray waistcoats, and black gowns. They all looked alike: each with a Quran and prayer beads in hand, with beards and quick, self-confident steps and stern looks. No sooner did they step down from the sidewalk, however, than a small black carriage pulled by two white horses stopped in front of them; a lady wearing the traditional burqa and black abaya stepped out. Abd al-Rahman and Ismail hired the carriage for a ride across the city before going to Dalal Masabni’s Grief Adab nightclub near the Roxy cinema.

They were both silent as they soaked in pleasure, taking in the streets lined with high-rise buildings and admiring the sidewalks canopied with eucalyptus trees. Behind the two men, the minarets and silent green domes of the mosques reached into the air. The streets were lit with kerosene lamps that guided pedestrians on foggy nights. They took in the scene unfolding on the sidewalks crowded with water pipes and waiters serving cups of tea to elegant customers in western dress. They had to walk close to the moss that grew in the mud breaking through the cracks of the asphalt sidewalks. Unveiled women crowded the cafés and groceries in the markets. Some sat on their doorsteps. It was a common scene at that time: the Royal and Roxy cinemas,
the Mackenzie and Coronet bookstores, the Swiss café, Orosdi Back department store, Sartre, and Trotsky. Throughout that decade Abd al-Rahman was like a crocodile with tears constantly in his eyes. As he walked, his eyes would wander left and right, fixing on women with big breasts revealed by low-cut dresses. He stared at their soft bodies and golden legs, the denim skirts, the shiny umbrellas.

2

The philosopher of al-Sadriya was not short on despondent friends, but he needed a public post and had to write articles to introduce himself to society. He was handsome and appealed to women, and men were impressed by his elegance. He had money to spend on prostitutes. He was smart, funny, and, indeed, quite popular among the literary café-goers. At that time, it pleased society men to encounter a young Baghdadi who was capable of engaging the greatest western philosophers and thinkers, including Sartre. They took special pleasure in seeing him sitting alone in a corner, meditating on existence and its nihilistic nature. They enjoyed listening to his strange language, difficult and complicated, about existence by and for itself. For his part, he enjoyed his quick fame and prominence. He was proud of his social class, but he was a modest philosopher who had acquired some French manners: simple elegance, well chosen words, and mannerisms that were usually lost when he drank. He was hoping for a prominent position, real power, and resounding fame, but his awareness of his shortcomings had convinced him that a philosopher does not work, he philosophizes.

In 1957, on a visit to Baghdad while still a student in Paris, his father introduced him to Prime Minister Nouri al-Said, hoping to secure a position for him upon his return to the country, to serve as a philosopher in the cabinet of ministers.
The brilliant politician took great interest in him and gave him a piece of advice he never forgot, “You are a philosopher, and you must continue to do your philosophy. Work would interfere with your activities as a philosopher. An office job is not for you, and you can do without it. Work is for creatures like us who are not capable of such noble and great thinking.”

Abd al-Rahman was relieved to hear these words. His father had placed him in a rather delicate situation, from which the prime minister had in fact freed him. His father, however, did not share his relief but, rather, was depressed, angry, and resentful; he was convinced that the prime minister felt threatened by his son’s genius. The prime minister, on the other hand, remarked in his memoirs of the year 1957 (a modest notebook that was in the possession of Mrs. Amna al-Said), that, “The honorable Shawkat Amin often burdens me with suggestions that, if I were to apply them, would turn the political situation upside down and destroy us. Today he brought me his son, the one we got rid of by sending him off to study philosophy in Paris. He suggested that we appoint him as the cabinet’s philosopher after his return from Paris. I explained to him delicately that appointing a philosopher to the cabinet would not bolster its survival. What’s more alarming is the fact that his son returned from Paris worse off than he was before he went. As soon as I heard the young man speak I became convinced that, without a doubt, he was crazy. If he is not crazy then I am crazy. By God, I wonder how these riffraff became aristocrats!”