Najem Wali “Soad and the Military”. A review. – Culture

Authors all over the world know that the detour via fiction is often the shortest. For writers from authoritarian societies, however, the form of the key novel is often the only way in which content can be smuggled past the censorship to the readers. The writer Najem Wali knows that, of course, he was born in Iraq in 1956 and lived there until he fled in 1980 at the beginning of the Iraqi-Iranian war.

How quickly reality can catch up with fiction has been known to Wali at least since he wanted to publish his latest novel – maybe he already knew it beforehand and took the confrontation into account. At the center of his story is an Egyptian singer and actress named Soad, who is worshiped by the people and abused by the ruling system. When rumors emerged that she wanted to write her memoirs – memories that could be quite uncomfortable for certain gentlemen – Soad died in exile in Britain. Maybe it was suicide, maybe it was an accident. Maybe neither of them.

There actually was an actress and singer named Soad Hosny. In the times of King Faruk she achieved fame as a singing child star, and during the years of the Nasser dictatorship she rose to be the diva of Egyptian film. In 2001, Hosny fell – from the balcony on the sixth floor of a London apartment tower, in which other Egyptians abroad had previously been mysteriously dead. There is no evidence that the real Soad wanted to reveal secrets and therefore had to die, but in Najem Wali’s novel the first-person narrative writer is given notebooks with the draft of Soad’s memoirs on a visit to Cairo. Quite dangerous lines, because “the military understood no joke as soon as they were concerned,” the narrator remarks at one point. “If the booklet had only been titled Soad, there would have been no problem, no matter what its contents said, no matter what secrets were revealed. None of this would have been a misdemeanor or a crime. But their title was Soad and That Military, and that, that was a crime! “

“There wasn’t an Arab king or president who didn’t want to go to bed with a star like you.”

When Wali was looking for a way to publish his novel – and this is where fiction and reality intersect – he struggled, several publishers in Iraq and Lebanon canceled. The book was supposed to have the same name that made the notebooks in the novel so dangerous. And when his book finally appeared in the Baghdad Dastoor publishing house in 2020, no state censor had struck, but anticipatory self-censorship had struck. The word military was covered with a black bar on the cover, probably out of fear of consequences for the publisher in the most populous country in the Arab world, Egypt, where the military has been more or less uninterrupted since 1952.

But the rulers in Egypt were not as indifferent to the content of the book, now without the word “military” as the narrator suspects. It was not allowed to be presented at the Cairo Book Fair in 2021 and ended up on the index. Because what Wali describes in his novel – and what you can now read in German thanks to the translation by Christine Battermann – is a parable on the stranglehold in which men in uniform hold society and the state, art and economy in Egypt and other countries .

The national icon Soad, as the reader learns partly from her notes, partly from conversations between the narrator and her long-time partner, an American, was used by the secret service throughout her life. As a child she had to sing about the revolution of the free officers or the nationalization of the Suez Canal in front of the masses. As an adult, her manager in uniform, Officer Sharif, urged her to do other things: he had Soad drugged and seduced by a decoy, only to blackmail her with the secretly recorded film of her defloration.

In addition to the innumerable cinema productions that made her the “Cinderella” of Egypt, Soad now has to make similar clandestine films for the secret service – with ministers and company executives, politicians and despots, from whom she was supposed to coax secrets on the edge of the bed. It works because “there wasn’t an Arab king or president who didn’t want to go to bed with a star like you”. Even in the fragments of the actress’s memoirs, which Wali repeatedly sprinkles in, she tells about herself soberly and in the third person – which avoids the danger of overly human erotic prose, but remains strangely impersonal.

When Wali describes how the craziest of Soad’s targets, the “leader of the hour” Saddam Hussein, never gets an erection at the meetings and tries to compensate for his impotence through sadistic practices, that is probably the mixture of fact and fiction that Wali in called “faction” in an interview. Not verifiable, but absolutely conceivable given what is known about the butcher of Baghdad. Beyond the anecdotal, Wali’s descriptions of the Egyptian military and intelligence officers, which Soad can never really shake off, go beyond the anecdotal. Here her story takes on a systemic character: “If Sharif wanted to achieve a certain goal, he could hold out for years. The important thing was not how long something lasted, what was important was success.”

It is no coincidence that this is reminiscent of the time after the Egyptian revolution, when the men in uniform temporarily left the field to the young people from Tahrir Square and then to the Muslim Brotherhood. Only until they had organized their comeback to power in an ice cold manner. Ten years after Mubarak’s fall, books in which Arab authors mix contemporary facts with fiction are no longer about the revolution, but about the Restoration – the form of the key novel still has some future in the region.