Ten years after the publication of “The Mountain of Green Tea,” a collection of Yahya Taher Abdullah’s short stories translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, the AUC Press has released “The Collar and the Bracelet,” a novella first published in Arabic in 1975 as “al-Tawq wa-l-iswira”. This constitutes a long-awaited opportunity to shed light once again on one of Egypt’s most gifted writers.
Yahya Taher Abdullah (1938-1981) was a prominent figure within the circle of writers known as the Generation of the Sixties. He was killed at the age of 43 with his wife in a car crash. The tragic accident brought an abrupt end to a promising literary career. Abdullah is survived by Asma, his only child. The famous Egyptian filmmaker, Atteyat Al Abnoudi, a close friend of the deceased couple, immediately took responsibility for Asma and brought her up as her own daughter.
Yahya Taher Abdullah was born in the ancient village of Karnak near the tourist center of Luxor in southern Egypt. He moved to Cairo in 1964 at the age of twenty-six and quickly became known for the gripping public performances of his work. Abdullah had the rare ability to memorize his stories. He recited them by heart, at unforgettable literary gatherings in the 60s and 70s. He mesmerized the audience with his infectious charisma, his natural talent for acting which was augmented by a consuming passion for writing. These dazzling recitals attracted the attention of famous writers such as Yusuf Idris.
As an editor, Yusuf Idris was able to familiarize the literary world with the work of Yahya Taher Abdullah, one of the pillars of the generation of the 60s. Although the younger generation of writers considered the prolific and genial Yusuf Idris a benchmark, the latter remained in a world of his own. Mohamed El-Bisatie rightly points out that the writers who tried to imitate Yusuf Idris gave up writing after a few years. Members of the 60s generation saw Idris as a ruthless literary patriarch who could be at the same time a helper and a rival.
“We were always taking issue with him, and he with us. Yet even in the course of disagreements, we would furtively return to his books in order to regain our faith in magnificent writing” admits Bisatie.
In a useful after word, the translator Samah Selim describes Yahya Taher Abdullah “as a poet, a master craftsman of language steeped in a centuries-old oral tradition, a modern-day heir to the itinerant balladeers who performed the ancient epic cycles of North Africa from the fifteenth century onward. But he was also a consummate storyteller who expertly mobilized the formal resources of the traditional Islamic tale to create a richly ironic and distinctly modern literary language.”
During the 18 years he spent in Cairo, Abdullah wrote five collections of short stories and four novellas. One of them, “The Collar and the Bracelet” which was made into a film directed by Khairy Bishara. Despite his growing success, Abdullah lived a precarious existence. Unlike most of his fellow writers, he did not have a secure job and writing was his only source of income.
“The Collar and the Bracelet” is the saga of the Bishari family: Hazina Al-Bishari, her son, Mustafa, a notorious bandit, her daughter Fahima consumed by guilt, and her beautiful granddaughter Nabawiya. The author weaves a short but concise story steeped in dramatic emotions: Love and greed, fear and death as well as the desire to dominate and exploit the other.
Abdullah’s style marked by repetition, alliteration and rhyme, reflects the rich and evocative language of rural Egypt. According to the translator, Samah Selim, this constitutes the greatest challenge: “How to remain faithful to his Arabic phrase with its sudden images, its peculiar elisions and repetitions, while evoking for the English-language reader the vast repertoire of literary and poetic allusion that lies close beneath the surface? How to convey the compact and remarkable elegant oral quality of his prose without resorting to the kinds of easy English colloquialisms that would empty it of its striking and highly crafted poeticism?” asked Samah Selim.
“The wind swept down like an unruly steed from its distant prison. It lifted the brittle twigs from the rooftops and wrenched the dead leaves from the branches of trees and brushed away the layers of fine dust on the ground. It flung twigs, leaves, and dust onto faces, houses, and rickety doors. It gathered up the few tufts of scattered gray clouds in the sky so high and the sky grew dark and heavy. When the sky had swept its pure tears onto this earth clamoring with the iniquity of men, the dust settled and cleared the air. The light spread, the wind went back to its fortress, the sky turned bright blue, and the children went out to look for scarabs and stones and rings and anything else that the secretive land of their grandfathers might have revealed” writes Abdullah.
Yahya Taher Abdullah’s evocative style transports us to the timeless landscapes of Upper Egypt and the tragic story of “The Collar and the Bracelet” introduces us to the struggle of its people against poverty, exploitation and change. He has the rare ability to delve into a society with no equivalent in Western literature. He describes with a unique poetic vibrancy, the harsh life and rigid codes of behavior of the peasants of Upper Egypt; in his novellas and short stories — and to the end of his short life — he remained totally committed to the art of writing.
