It was at Heathrow Airport that I spent four hours wrapped in writing so beautiful that I was moved to tears. The author was Ahdaf Soueif, and the book, “The Map of Love.” Short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1999, the novel stretches over almost an entire century in its tale of divided loyalties, love and identity. One savors the glimpses into the past, the references to relationships forged in a distant and difficult time while at the same time looking forward to developments in the present.
The novel concerns Lady Anna Winterbourne, recently widowed in 1900, who has come to Egypt to explore the world which had caused her husband’s death. While she is there, fate guides her to meet Sharif Al-Barudi, an Egyptian patriot. Anna is no more to Sharif at first than a representation of all that is crass and vulgar about European women. For Anna, he is the Egypt she came to see but cannot as long as her British friends shelter her. The two are drawn to one other and forced to question their conflicting cultures. All the while, the narrative moves back and forth between the contemporary world — with Anna and Sharif’s descendants — and the world of early 20th century Egypt.
Meeting Ahdaf Soueif is like meeting everything that is meaningful in today’s Muslim world. She is beautifully groomed, soft spoken and full of energy which is not easy for her to contain. All at the same time, she is renovating her house, type-setting her mother’s translation of “The Map of Love,” constantly communicating with literary friends, preserving Arabic manuscripts, translating a friend’s novel and taking care of her family.
The interview begins as I whip out my notepad and she offers me some cake. What I discovered during our hour together was a woman of the modern world who is aware of her heritage, poised to embrace change and accept the workings of fate that has brought her literary fame in the Western world. What she is not willing to accept is the negative perception of Arabs everywhere outside the Arab world. What Ahdaf Soueif wants to dispel is the media-propagated image of the Arab as a terrorist. Her book, besides being a beautiful love story that makes one wonder if it is Anna or Egypt who is the heroine, also seeks to banish many misconceptions about Islam and the Muslim world.
Born in Egypt, she divides her time between London and Cairo. Her sense of belonging to two different cultures pervades the novel’s themes and leave their imprints on the characters. “I often feel that because I wear Western clothes, don’t wear the hijab, and speak unaccented, clear English, I am perceived as an Arab in disguise, especially when I give my views on the Muslim way of life.”
While her loyalties were questioned in Arab circles when her earlier novel, “The Eye of the Sun” was published — she was accused of exoticising the East — “The Map of Love” leaves no doubt as to her commitment to the cause of Muslims in particular and Arabs in general. “‘The Eye of the Sun’ was a commentary on cross-cultural values, but it did not put the reader on either side of the fence. It did not force you to question your own prejudices. ‘The Map of Love’ is uncompromising, positioning itself in Egypt. There can be no doubt as to where my loyalties lie.”
Because the book is true to Ahdaf Soueif’s own experience, a question begs to be asked: Where does she appear in the novel? “Amal’s voice is mine. Sharif Al-Barudi’s political convictions are mine.” She continues, “When you live in the West you cannot help seeing how you are represented. In literature, there are always characters which certain groups empathize with. We have wonderful Arabic literature but there is a massive linguistic problem; a literal translation can turn anything into a joke.” And that in turn makes an Arab point of view in English all the more important. “Fiction touches people’s hearts. Which is why I chose to bring the people a view of Egypt. Characters enliven historical perspectives; political intrigues, peoples’ joys and tragedies become easy to relate to.”
Did she have any idea that she would have such a huge success? First a laugh and then a modest answer. “You hope that what you are writing works for the world; you hope and sometimes you get lucky. You hope the characters come alive. I suppose I got lucky with this one.”
The novel was a real challenge to Ahdaf who had written only critically acclaimed short stories. “I thought, this is where I will see if I am a real writer. In my short stories, characters were modeled on people I knew and experiences I had had. The stories were based on things that rang true to me as a person from the Muslim world melting into the world of Western writing and perception, yet keeping my Egyptian heritage alive.”
It is the feedback and the time spent with her family her husband and two sons that she finds most rewarding now. “When my mother read the book, it was the first time that she had said anything other than ‘It’s quite good.’” Ahdaf Soueif’s mother, herself a professor of English literature at Cairo University, thus set the seal of encouragement on her daughter’s book. Nor is that the end of the story. Ahdaf excuses herself and returns with an Arabic manuscript. It is her mother’s labor of love: a translation of “The Map of Love” into Arabic. “She is incredible, 73 years old and diabetic so you can imagine what it took for her to do this.” In fact, her mother postponed an eye operation in order to produce a translation worthy of the novel. The Arabic translation is fittingly dedicated to Ahdaf Soueif’s mother, “Fatima Mousa: from her I began and to her I return.”
What is she working on right now? “I’m not. Working on anything right now that is.” She smiles, pointing to the unhung paintings and articles of furniture strewn about. “I am completely immersed in redoing the house.”
We then touch on the factors that contributed to her literary sensibility. She grew up surrounded by books. While her mother studied for a Ph.D. at London University, she learned to read from “The Arabian Nights” and English comics. Later, she devoured her mother’s library. Ahdaf Soueif’s parents were both active against the British presence in Egypt, but her mother loved English books. One night, her mother saw British army trucks being driven by women — an image of empowerment that would stay with her long after the British left Egypt.
Ahdaf Soueif’s views on the veil in Muslim society were particularly impressive. “Part of what ‘The Map of Love’ is about is the inner workings of Egyptian society or an Egyptian household at the beginning of the 20th century. Anna, our English heroine, is captivated in London by Frederick Lewis’ paintings of Egyptian domestic interiors. I, too, love those paintings. I wanted to take Anna into one of those interiors and make her become part of it, bring it all to life. The veil was very much part of life then. When Anna is first introduced to the veil, it makes it possible for her to move about freely without being recognized. It is, therefore, an agent of her liberation rather than an instrument of repression as she had imagined it to be. I think part of what ‘The Map of Love’ does is to turn upside down, or at least to give a different perspective to, Western notions about Egypt, about the Arab world, about Islam, and about the veil. It does not set out to do this deliberately. It’s something that develops gradually because the novel gives an accurate description of these things as they actually are in our own — Egyptian — consciousness.”
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(The Guardian commissioned a series of articles about the Israeli occupation by Ahdaf Soueif. They can be read at www. guardianunlimited.com under the author’s name. They were also published in Arabic in Al-Hayat on Dec. 20, 21 and 22, 2000.)
