Papa Sartre: A Modern Arabic Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) by Ali Bader Read Free Book Online

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 bepart 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’sresponse. 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,