The Egyptian writer Soad Suliman addresses her daily life, events and collapse in her recently published novel ‘Hot Rises’
By Ashraf Aboul-Yazid
The woman’s body in the years of despair represents an aborted revolution, the Egyptian writer Soad Suliman addresses her daily life, events and collapse in her novel (Hot Rises), recently published by Rawafed. Names do not mean much, as that aborted revolution does not belong to the voice of the narrator alone.
The novel, the narrator, the writer chooses to chronicle her city, or her beating heart, making history from the geography she loves – Downtown – so it was not strange that she dedicated the novel to Mekkawi Said, who represents the mayor of Downtown for this generation of writers, and to her friend, the short story writer Wasima Al-Khatib.
The novel gives its chapters to spectrums of rises, starting from the title (Habbat Sakhena); Hot Rises, turning into a sarcastic rise, a tender rise, successive saving rises, a charming rise, an external rise, a harsh rise, a fierce rise, an extremely hot rise, carbon dioxide women (they must embody suffocating rises), rises that gnaw at my body, Lolita/Layla rises, the game of hot rises.
We would ask about the secret of naming those rises and their classifications: Are they uprisings of the body that is sometimes revolting, and sometimes relapsed? Are they the dominant feminist biographies in that space? Are they a contradictory and oscillating vision of reality and the recent past; as if they were projections of the last decade in Egypt? Or is it a narrative trick to title the chapters?
It is clear that the events do not narrate biographies as much as they are a mirror of cultural biographies. They do not monitor the birth, growth, maturity, marriage, divorce, travel and migration of its many characters, despite recording and referring to that, but rather record a panoramic mental journey of this generation. Note that the names have universal roots. You can say that they transcend borders, both geographical and temporal. Otherwise, how would they bring together Salma and Sultana, Shams and Qamar, Farida and Fitna, Amira and Issaf, Samaher and Sinai, Lolita and Rajia…; etc.
But we must realize that the imagined physical and psychological gifts take us to realistic scenes, as if they were diaries that intersect with those gifts. Rather, as if the gifts were written to document them with the names of their owners, and to take their reader from fictional events to a documentary reality that represents a parallel world.
Here we stand at the edge of a dangerous question about the strength of the fictional imagination that does not care about the risk of entering the documentary trap. But this feature in the novel in my hands is not strange or new, as I did not find anything strange or new in its use in my novel (The Translator), where the reader finds real names and realistic characters in the events.
Soad Suliman collects all the stories of the revolution as if she is panting through the pages to document them, so that they are not forgotten.
In Soad Suliman’s novel (Hot Rises), the doctor offers the solution: a hysterectomy to stop these rises, meaning there will be no tomorrow, no hope, and no life for a generation that will suffer. The novel tells this directly in events whose characters live in parallel with the events of the January 2011 revolution in Egypt. Characters enter the police stations for investigation, and others are beaten in Abdin Police Station. Soad Suliman collects all the stories of the revolution as if she is panting through the pages to document them, so that they are not forgotten.
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It seems that the narrator’s readings and investigative research lead her to correct many common historical narratives, such as the story of Isaac Daoud, or Isaac David, and his stories with Taheyya Kariokka, Samia Gamal (Egyptian belly dancers and film actresses), Anwar Wagdi (Egyptian actor), and the young actress Fairuz, and his escape to the Israeli occupation state after the 1952 revolution for fear of being accused of espionage: she tells that he traveled to his native country, Austria, and when Sultana, who married his grandson, intends to restore his reputation by filming a documentary about him, his grandson Isaac Dixon comes to follow the January revolution. Sultana loves him, after they met in Tahrir Square, as if one revolution had distanced the grandfather, and another revolution had revived his memory with the arrival of the grandson, who declared his conversion to Islam in a theatrical scene at the Riche Café, and knelt on one knee, and presented her with a ring asking for marriage.
The novel scatters the history of downtown architecture, as if it were a summons to the people who lived in those places and breathed their air. Therefore, it was not strange that the most important male hero was the character of the late writer Mekkawi Said, or (Mickey), as his relatives called him. As if he was reading the draft of the novel when he said:
“You are a bunch of girls, all drama, with his usual sarcasm (Mekkawi Said) added, but black drama, one day I will write you, I made a special chair for you, I will call you a carbon dioxide women.
– Why? Why not oxygen women? We are reviving a country. Sinai is making trouble for it.
– Oxygen for others, you are a slut from you, but you breathe the same from each other, you are supposed to be all writers and intellectuals, a director, a visual artist, a tour guide, a stylist, an actress, a nudist, and Ms. Salma is a great journalist, but you are all silly women, the girls younger than you, who do not have your capabilities, achieve accomplishments and break the world.
Then Mekkawi Said continues, as if he is the conscience that awakens inside each of the novel’s characters:
– You are stupid; the love that delays your life disappears, especially you, Sinai, oh “A Rise,” said (Sinai), “you are the last of your (Zifta), or at most (Abu Tasht), and I am not telling you that (Talkha) suits you, because you are a stain.”
(Zifta), (Abu Tasht), and (Talkha) are different towns, they are brought as symbols of humble geographical distances.
Soad Suliman writes: “Mekkawi was busy with many literary projects, and died on December 2, 2017, before he started or finished his novel about us.” Perhaps the reader will see that Mekkawi Said’s notebook was with Soad Suliman, because she presented the women of carbon dioxide, with their colorful gifts, in her novel that is raging with sex and other affairs (Hot Rises).
I was not concerned with retelling the events or following the characters or summarizing what happened, because that was not the point of the novel, but rather it is a passage through the lines of the notebook/novel, allowing for a lot of oxygen to be breathed in a suffocating world.
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Ashraf Aboul-Yazid is a renowned Egyptian poet, journalist, novelist, travelogue writer and translator. He is author of around three dozen books and Editor-in-Chief of Silk Road Literature Series.
