The Cairo Trilogy

Recently, I've been consumed by trilogies, finishing up first the Maddaddam trilogy and now Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy. I enjoy that in my unemployment I have the luxury of more time to read and am excited about maintaining reading for pleasure when I start working. As a teacher I always had something to reread for school, which would always take precedence over pleasure reading, but now I have the complete freedom to read what I want when I want.

Prior to reading these books, I had read some of Mahfouz's short stories and taught one of them, "Half a Day," but I happened to pick Palace Walk from a shelf in my classroom and then continued with Palace of Desire and Sugar Street more out of a desire to continue to follow the lives of Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad and his family than out of a love for the first novel. In reading all of them, I was struck by the same feeling: while feeling an increasing love for the characters and their unique challenges, I always wondered when something was going to happen. What was the point of these novels at all? Yet, something did happen time and time again. People died, others mourned for them. People married, babies soon followed. War and revolution were a consistent backdrop. Yet, I never shook the feeling that nothing ever happened. That life just continued.

I believe that in this apparent contradiction lies the power of these novels, the reason that Mahfouz is a Nobel Prize winning writer and not just some guy writing about people in Cairo. The rhythm of The Cairo Trilogy captures the rhythm of life itself. Change comes on suddenly and then fades into the background. When Amina visits the mosque of al-Husayn for the first time and breaks her collarbone, Ahmad Abd al-Jawad's discovery of this fact rattles the family. Yet, years later Amina is free to come and go as she pleases, and Ahmad Abd al-Jawad's wrath is the stuff of legend not the present reality. His grandchildren cannot even imagine what life was like under his oppressive regime, a regime that felt completely inescapable to his children during their own youths. Fahmy's death shakes everyone to the core, but they must move on, Yasin even marrying Fahmy's infatuation Maryam for a time.

Not everyone moves on quickly from tragedy. Aisha is the greatest example of what happens when we cling too strongly to the past. Her physical beauty is destroyed and replaced by anxiety and depression. She fades into the background of the narrative almost as if she is no longer living. Ahmad Abd al-Jawad himself also fades from the center of the narrative as he is confined to his home before his death. While he reveled in his extravagant lifestyle during his youth, we see the toll that too much food and drink can take on a person in his and his friends' deaths. Even Kamal, whose turmoil over Aida forms much of the conflict of Palace of Desire, loses the vitality that informed his desire to become a philosopher and to try and answer the big questions of existence. Both he and his nephew Ahmad come to the realization that he has not been successful in his quest to understand existence. Ahmad must admit that his "uncle does not pay enough attention to these matters [the class struggle/need for a socialist revolution]," that in his attempts to understand the world Kamal has distanced himself from it and rejected any responsibility to change it. Kamal himself feels helpless, having lost chances with Aida and then Budur and opportunities for success and notoriety.

Ahmad, Abd al Muni'm, and Ridwan exemplify the plurality of possibilities for young people in a society where there is no longer just one way to exist. Ahmad, a Marxist, wants to destroy capitalist oppression and finds a partner who is intellectually his superior and pushes him to think and act in new ways. Abd al Muni'm, a member of the Muslim Brethren, clings to a traditional society that has never really existed and signals the beginning of the fundamentalist movement. Ridwan is idealized by his father Yasin because of his success but struggles with hiding his homosexuality and the question of why others suggest he must get married to do so. Each of these young men represents an extreme divergent path, and each is punished by society for the path he chooses. While in some ways they point to a more a meaningful way of living as they embrace and develop their own identities, there seems to be little hope for the future as the freedom to be oneself does not exist.

Where these novels are so successful is in the way that Mahfouz so expertly captures the ebb and flow of life and how our experiences impact us differently to form who we are. We see warnings everywhere around us about the paths we take, yet we often do not heed these warnings as we are drawn down paths through some combination of our physical needs and experiences. Mahfouz allows us to see many possible means of existence and their effects over the course of generations.

The Death of (White Male) Adulthood

Reading A.O. Scott's New York Times piece "The Death of Adulthood in American Culture", I was struck by the way he universalized the white male experience as the American experience. Almost all of the characters and real people he discussed, and all that he discussed in a positive way are white men. Yet, he argues that the change that he is documenting is not just the destruction of the patriarchy but the destruction of the entire construct of what it means to be an adult. In beginning his article by discussing Mad Men, Scott gives the impression that that the world of that show is the adult world. While it is certainly a world in which on the outside at least the characters aspire to the American Dream, a house in the suburbs stocked with a wife and some children, even from the beginning of the show Don and the rest of the ad men do not seem capable of living up to those expectations. They fail again and again to stay faithful and suffer from bouts of depression and self-doubt. You might argue that the womanizing and alcoholism is part of the dream, part of the masculine power that they cling so strongly to, but if that is the case, then why don't they revel in it? Mad Men shows as a world full of adults who are forced to repress themselves for the sake of conformity and their struggle through failing to do so. The adulthood of that world seems to be a facade masking the inner turmoil of the post-World War II generation.

Scott also sees adulthood as related to growing up, coming to a new understanding about the world and changing as a result of it. In this way, he sees Huck Finn as being different from an Adam Sandler or Seth Rogen character. Yet, while the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn may be intended to teach the reader a thing or two about slavery and the humanity of enslaved peoples, Huck himself ends the novel by asserting he's going to run away West. His refusal to be civilized is a refusal to grow up and embrace the responsibilities of adulthood. In that way, it is possible to mature, to reach new understandings, while still embracing the (possibly) childlike urge for freedom. The ambivalence of The Catcher in the Rye's ending illustrates this point as well. Holden does seem to come to a new understanding of his own inability to protect children from the adult world when he says, "The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them." Yet, whether he will buckle down and study so that he can find his place in the conventional adult world is unclear. Salinger, of course, eventually rejected this world himself. All three of these examples show the tension that white American males have faced in trying to reconcile their traumatic experiences with the social expectations that are placed on them by outside pressures.

So, then I would argue that changing the definition of what it means to be a white American male adult is healthy and positive for our society. Men now have the opportunity to shape their identities in different ways without the same consequences for breaking social norms. While, of course, pressure remains depending on each individual's social and economic background, a plurality of ways of being a man have come into being. There are brony conventions and beer kickball leagues that allow adult men the opportunity to enjoy pastimes that were originally intended for children. The idea of "New Sincerity" (which I just learned about today) allows us to own the real pleasure in taking part in activities that we used to write off as guilty or ironic. While there are certainly people who feel more comfortable in consuming media intended for adults or see it as containing more valuable/thought provoking insight, the plurality of our culture today allows for people's interests to run counter to the notion of the superiority of the canon. While it can be overwhelming to be lost in a sea of identities trying to find one that fits or deciding to reject the idea of defining yourself at all, this reality is superior to one in which those who don't conform are pushed to the margins and express their frustration in ways that hurt others as Don Draper does.

Returning to my original desire in writing this essay, I was struck in reading Scott's piece that he ascribed a white male perspective to a homogenous idea of American culture. While many writers have dealt with threats to male dominance in other cultures (Achebe, Mahfouz, and Adichie come to mind off the top of my head), the idea of adulthood as being defined by what we consume and the image that we create for ourselves seems to be a very mainstream (and therefore white) American one. We often think of children's media as being silly and adult media as being serious, and as as a result, we view silly media  intended for adults (like the Apatow/Rogen fare that Scott pans) as being childish. Ironically, we see British humor, which is decidedly silly, as somehow sophisticated and adult. Our culture is founded on consumerism, and this consumerism has caused us to put what we consume into categories. The reason that Scott's piece had to be so focused on the white male experience, besides it being his own experience, is that other cultures seem less likely to define the distinction between adults and children by the books that they read or the movies they watch. In South Africa, I would often go to school and talk to the other teachers about whatever movie had been on TV last night, and they never once were embarrassed to have watched Ice Age or Harry Potter because they were not privy to the information that those movies were not intended for sophisticated adults to watch.

Of course, the influence of the American media is huge, and there are plenty of people of various races around in the US and around the world who want to fit into the identity categories that the American media has helped shape. There are other countries as well, France being an obvious example, in which intellectualism is highly valued and considered to be adult. All around the world people have ideas about what it means to be an adult, most of which deal with taking on responsibilities within families. The problem with American ideals of adulthood is that they are based in consumerism. As a result, they are easily eroded through economic shifts (another article deals with the economic reasons behind the death of adulthood). Considering both the positives that come along with being able to adopt an identity that fits and the negatives of the possible shirking of responsibility, the question that remains is if these two sides to adulthood really go together at all. Is adulthood dead or has the image of what it means to be an adult shattered into many possibilities? Are these possibilities real or are they just more images created by the structures of power in our society? I hope that we can continue to build our knowledge and sense of our place in our families and communities while acknowledging our differences and the extent to which they are our own and the extent to which they have been shaped by our consumer culture.