"The Machete", a new book from acclaimed Egyptian author Ahmed Towfik, is released this month. SOURCE: ERNESTO BENAVIDES/AFP/Getty Images[/caption]
Sprawled over a train track in post-revolutionary Cairo, a young girl is found dead, apparently after committing suicide.
Scrawled on a nearby wall is some mysterious, almost illegible graffiti. Some people think it reads sebha, the Egyptian word for prayer beads. Others think the word is sirga, a type of factory that manufactures oil from sesame seeds.
All the guesswork has one thing in common: the various interpretations point to something related to the dead girl’s past.
A writer takes up the case, and delving into the victim’s history he begins to uncover some dark secrets. It transpires that she was once raped in a factory, and also has a mark on her face from when she was attacked by with a machete. Every fresh upturned stone delivers a new explanation—yet all of them turn out to be wrong.
[inset_left]When you grow up in this environment you have to read. And when you read so much, you have to write.[/inset_left] So begins Machete, the forthcoming novel by celebrated Egyptian author Ahmed Towfik. Speaking to Egypt Unwrapped this week, Towfik explained that he wrote the story to convey the sense of confusion which followed last year’s uprising against Hosni Mubarak.
“Are we alright or not?” he asked, stirring his glass of orange juice in Groppi, the jaded, belle époque café in downtown Cairo. “Will we get out of this or are we going down? I’m not quite sure.”
Towfik, who in his day job works as a professor of tropical diseases, has got past form when it comes to unsettling his growing readership. One of his previous bestsellers was Utopia, a nightmarish vision of Egypt’s future which drew comparisons with Anthony Burgess and his opus A Clockwork Orange.
In Towfik’s tale, a colony of ultra-privileged nihilists takes shape on Egypt’s north coast, protected by US marines and living in contempt of the downtrodden “Others” who inhabit the periphery. “It was warning,” said Towfik, who said he penned the novel to illustrate his fears about the rot setting into Egyptian society. “It was my way of saying this country is going astray.”
But despite these concerns—and the concerns of his fellow liberals about the direction their country might take under the Muslim Brotherhood—Towfik is now actually relatively optimistic:
[blockquote]I don’t support the Muslim Brotherhood by any means and I hate the idea of a theocracy. I hate this idea very much. But I think Mohamed Morsi is honest and wants to do some good, so I’m asking people to wait and see. But I find that people are trying to make him fail, so that when he fails they can say, ‘see, he failed’.”[/blockquote]
Originally from the Nile Delta city of Tanta, Towfik was born in 1962 during the heady years of Nasserism. His father, the manager of a cotton factory nationalized by the revolutionary Egyptian demagogue, was a devout follower of the new Egyptian creed. Towfik recalled:
[blockquote]He was very proud of Nasser. He thought he had come to save Egypt. . . After the 1967 war everybody was shocked and my father developed a real depression. He believed Nasser was a demigod and could do anything. But he was defeated, and in a pathetic manner. When you grow up in this environment you have to read. And when you read so much, you have to write. [/blockquote]
Towfik’s early appetite for world literature was voracious. By the time he was ten years old he had read Dr. Zhivago, the epic novel set between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Second World War. Chekhov and Mark Twain soon followed, and later he developed a taste for the pithy witticisms of Oscar Wilde.
His love of international literature also led him to translate a series of classics into Arabic, such as Moby Dick, 1984 and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But it was Utopia, which was translated into English last year, that really sent him into the publishing stratosphere. With his new book out this month, hopefully there will be many more gems to come from one of Egypt’s foremost professors.
