Hanan al-Shaykh on Romance, Writing, & Ihsan Abdel Kouddous

It’s publication day for iconic Egyptian novelist Ihsan Abdel Kouddous’s A Nose and Three Eyes, translated by Jonathan Smolin.

In this foreword to the translation, Hanan Al-Shaykh reflects on her romantic relationship with Kouddous and the insights that relationship offers into A Nose and Three Eyes. Beyond the details of their much-gossiped-about romantic relationship and the inspiration that it offered both writers, Al-Shaykh writes on the meaning of freedom, the process of fictionalizing a person, and Kouddous’s relationship to translation.

Tomorrow, we’ll have a look back at Ihsan Abdel Kouddous and more about his work.

Foreword

By Hanan al-Shaykh

When I learned that Jonathan Smolin had taken on translating some novels by Ihsan Abdel Kouddous into English and was writing a book about his fiction, I remembered a letter that Ihsan sent me in the summer of 1980. “I read in the press that your novel The Story of Zahra has been translated into French. Congratulations. I wish, my dear, that you could suggest to your French publisher to translate what they like of my work since I long to see one of my books translated into a foreign language.”

I still remember how I rushed to call him from London, where I lived, and how he told me at the end of the call “Hanan, you have to help your teacher. Don’t you remember, my dear, when I was the one who was an important writer?”

I met Ihsan for the first time in Cairo in early 1963, when I enrolled at a local secondary school to get my degree in literature. At that time, I was able to convince my father that this was the only way to qualify me to go to university to specialize in journalism. The truth of the matter was that I wanted to free myself and travel and
live in Cairo, the city of writers and novelists. My eyes had been opened to the love of reading and writing. I was writing reflections and publishing them in the student page in the daily newspaper Annahar in Beirut. In my writing, I focused on the personal freedom that I dreamed of achieving by any means, even if it meant resorting to tricks. I started conducting interviews with Lebanese politicians about their first loves and publishing them in Lebanese newspapers.

In Cairo, I took everything that I’d written and published, and I went to Rose El Youssef, where the doorman
accompanied me to Ihsan’s secretary who brought me into his chic office. After initial pleasantries, we agreed
that I’d write what I wanted on the condition that I wouldn’t be paid for anything that was published.

As soon as I left his office, I felt that I had fallen in love with him.

I tried as hard as I could to write something to entice him to publish it. And what happened was that the evening after I visited him, the supervisor of the girls’ dorm where I lived told me that I had a phone call from Rose El Youssef. It was Ihsan asking me if we could meet the following day on the Nile corniche, opposite Shepheard Hotel at six in the evening.

Ihsan was married and had two sons.

We fell in love without thinking about the age difference. I was eighteen and he was forty-four, even though when I asked him how old he was, he was quick to say he was forty. He took me all over Cairo as we talked, having a good time, laughing. He took me to beautiful and relaxing places. We kept meeting and he showed me Alexandria, making me fall in love with it, as well as Fayoum with its lake full of birds and rose-colored pelicans. But the corniche along the Nile was our favorite place for an outing. We’d drive around as we looked at the al-Saghir Mosque glitter on the Nile at night.

That summer, Ihsan met me in Lebanon, and we traveled together from Beirut to Rome, London, and Paris. I told my father that I’d won a literary prize and that I had to go get it in London.

I came back to Beirut three weeks later to face a storm in the local newspapers and magazines, which were talking about Ihsan Abdel Kouddous marrying a Lebanese girl named Hanan al-Shaykh and that the newlyweds spent their honeymoon in Europe. The hotel workers where Ihsan stayed in Beirut for a week before we left confirmed that we were married after they saw me with him inside the hotel almost nonstop, in addition to the fact that he gave the hotel our passports to get visas for us for the three European countries.

When I arrived at the Beirut airport, I was full of longing for Ihsan who had said goodbye to me at the airport in Rome. I was going to Beirut, and he was heading to Cairo, after we had spent the happiest and loveliest couple of weeks in Europe.

I got out of the taxi, took my bag, and carried it up the stairs of our house. I heard the clamor of the neighbors calling out, “Hanan’s back! Hanan’s back!” As soon as I got in the house, everything went crazy. The exhausted voice of my brother, as if he was hitting me with a whip, yelled out, “We know everything. We know that you traveled with Ihsan Abdel Kouddous. Tell us what happened!” And my father, acting like he only just heard the news, said, “What? My clever daughter Hanan was tricking us like that?” Then my brother said, “Let’s go and see how clever she is when we take her to the gynecologist for a virginity test.”

My anger, craziness, and longing to be with Ihsan made me run to the door and open it, yelling, “Okay, prison guards, take me to a thousand doctors!”

It seemed that my acting and confidence filled my father and brother with doubt and confusion. My desire to
protect Ihsan had become unbearable. I quickly found myself asking to reveal a secret to them, a secret that had
to stay between us or I’d wind up in jail. I told them that I did, in fact, travel to Europe to meet Ihsan and
bring him thousands of pounds that I was smuggling for him from Cairo. This was because the Egyptian authorities would only let Egyptians take out a limited amount from the country. My brother then whispered in fear, “You really are crazy. How did you do that? Where did you hide thousands of pounds?”

I responded by pointing to my hair: “Here.” And then, standing firm, I continued, “And in my bra, inside my pants, in my belt, around my waist, in the sleeves of my jacket, in the hem of my skirt.”

I took a deep cleansing breath, congratulating myself for my quick thinking, but things didn’t exactly go smoothly from there. My father cried out the Arabic saying, “Close the door that brings wind into your house and relax.” He continued, “We’re not letting you go back to Cairo!”

I yelled and screamed that they were blocking the path of my future, stopping me from going to university in Cairo now that I had my Egyptian secondary school degree.

My brother defended the decision by explaining that if I went back to Cairo, I’d be confirming the rumors that the newspapers had printed about my marriage to Ihsan, showing that it was all true and not simply rumors, and that people would start talking about it again.

None of my yelling, pleading, crying, or threats of suicide were successful before my family’s insistence on
preventing me from going back—in other words, preventing me from inhaling the breath of life.

I found myself determined to flee and go back to Cairo, especially since I had the return ticket that Ihsan had
bought for me when we were in Europe in case of an emergency, but the strict supervision of my family stopped me. I found myself threatening to end my life. I stopped eating and drinking water, and I refused to speak. It got to the point that I ran to get on top of the kitchen chair pretending that I was going to throw myself out of the
window. My tricks eventually worked, especially when I didn’t leave the bathroom for two days straight pretending to be vomiting and hallucinating. I finally heard my father utter the famous Arabic expression, “Seek knowledge, even if it is found as far as China”—in other words, agreeing to let me travel for school—while my brother started begging me to open the door, swearing on his honor that I could go to Cairo whenever I wanted.

I remember when I was with Ihsan in London and we had some Egyptian friends with us, including a former Arab queen. Ihsan sat next to her talking to her the whole evening. Afterwards, I chided him and told him that he was being self-centered by ignoring me. That surprised him and he said, “I’m a writer and a novelist. I take stories from life and people and their experiences. You want me not to feel curiosity about a former queen and ask her about her life?”

When we read the novels of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, we experience what’s happening in the psychologies of the
characters emotionally, socially, and politically. He exposed and corroborated the intimate relations between the individuals of society, particularly between men and women. He was among those who called for the freedom of the individual, something that he considered a life- jacket in the turbulent sea of life.

I once heard Ihsan say “If I give up my freedom, I’ve lost my soul.”

It’s true that the dramatic situations in his novels extended to the two of us when I saw Ihsan drive by me
quickly with a young woman next to him, the two of them deep in laughter as if they were in total harmony. I was nailed to my spot, feeling crushed that he was with another woman. I became a chimney letting out dark smoke.

Should I, I wondered, do what I was hearing from the supervisor of the girls’ dormitory and stop seeing Ihsan? My Egyptian friend Sharifa was also telling me that Ihsan changed lovers like he changed neckties. She advised me to wake up to the fact that every meeting with him was hurting my reputation.

When Ihsan next took me to the Mena House Hotel opposite the pyramids, I felt sad, depressed, and lost. I was
silent and distracted. He put his head between his hands leaning on the table and then looked up and told me that he had read my letter about what happened, which was twenty-four pages long. He didn’t agree that he wasn’t responsible for what he did. He said that I was wrong about the way I saw the reasons for his betrayal, and for using my personal philosophy of love, that our feelings contradict our desires, to try to absolve him. Nor did he appreciate my telling him that he ought to be completely honest with himself as to why he was excited to meet with another woman.

In a sudden movement, he took my hand, kissed it, and said, “Three women and a man. I wonder how each of them sees him? Hanan, this is the novel that I’m going to start writing tomorrow. I’ll call it A Nose and Three Eyes. The third eye is Lebanese, but the nose is the man!”

When Ihsan started writing the novel, things began to change. Ihsan was feeling isolated and disillusioned at the time, anxiety overcoming him about things in his life and work. He suffered in silence. Our relationship also
began to change. He no longer called me daily as he used to. He started asking me to meet him in his apartment
while he was writing the novel, whereas in the past, he would insist that we go out almost every day together to
restaurants and hotels where we’d dance the tango and watch the most famous Egyptian belly dancers.

I still remember how, in June 1964 as he was writing the third eye, Ihsan started writing something and then kept tearing it up until he finally finished. I asked him what he was writing, and he said that it was a letter to the
writer Tawfiq al-Hakim. I thought that maybe Ihsan was asking him to intervene with the authorities on his behalf, to return him to his position as chair of the board of Rose El Youssef after he had been informed that a former director of a dried fish factory had been appointed in his place. Ihsan’s sadness turned into pure anger that spewed lava like a volcano. As a result, he decided to resign from the position of editor-in-chief of Rose El Youssef, which he also held, contenting himself with just taking part in the editing.

When I heard from Jonathan Smolin that the novel A Nose and Three Eyes had created a crisis in official circles
and even with President Gamal Abdel Nasser personally, I was surprised. Feelings of grief and confusion overcame me because Ihsan never said anything to me about all these developments. Was it because I didn’t read the newspapers and magazines and had contented myself with living in the cocoon that I enjoyed in Cairo? I blamed myself because I didn’t pay attention to something that was being inflicted on Ihsan!

And now I’m wondering after more than half a century, did Ihsan want to protect me and prefer not to have me
share in the weight of his worries and put his troubles on my young shoulders at that time?

Is that, I wonder, why he hid from me the turmoil that was happening around A Nose and Three Eyes?

I said goodbye to Cairo at the beginning of summer 1966 and went back for good to Beirut. Some months after my return, I accepted a request from a Lebanese journalist to talk with him about the novel A Nose and Three Eyes, since I was the third eye. The interview was published with photos of me as I was holding a Kleenex with a kohl pen and some money, talking about boredom and freedom exactly like the third eye in the novel.

I admit that I represent the third eye. But Ihsan denied it and said that he took inspiration for the characters
of his novels from the world of the imagination, even though he frequently took them from situations and
experiences that he lived for real. The third eye of A Nose and Three Eyes was the embodiment of a generation that believed in existentialism and modern society with progressive values.

I remember when we were sitting together in his apartment as he was writing the third eye and how I’d read in
disbelief his incredible talent and cleverness. Even things that I said to him made their way into the dialogue and the plot.

Rereading the novel now reminded me of how the name Rihab was the name of my Lebanese friend whom I knew when I was living in the girls’ dorm in Cairo. Like the character in the novel, I also lived in Cairo with a Lebanese family after I was kicked out of the dormitory. This family had immigrated to Egypt from Lebanon at the beginning of the nineteenth century and, like in the novel, suffered from the nationalization of their factories.

I remember how I was the one who made up the story of smuggling money from Egypt to Europe and I was a
young woman who was holding a kohl pen, money, and Kleenex in my hand, not in a handbag.

But, unlike the heroine of the third eye, I had passionately fallen in love with Ihsan.

Nonetheless, I agree when Ihsan said that Hanan al-Shaykh isn’t the third eye. When I became a writer, I discovered that when I wrote about people I knew, they inevitably became different once they were cast as characters in a novel. If I decided to write the biography of these people, I’d be turned from a novelist into a historian or an employee at a health insurance company!

As a writer, I find myself getting on a train and traveling with a character on an open journey whose
destination is unknown to me, nor do I know who we’ll meet or what will happen when the train stops at the coming stations. That’s how we learn on the journey of writing, and we discover the truths of life that we didn’t understand before.

If Hanan al-Shaykh is not the third eye, who, then, is Hashim in the novel? Is he Ihsan himself when he
wanted to be transported from one relationship to another? Or did he mean to profoundly understand the depths of women?

My dear Ihsan, here are some of your writings translated into English, which means that they still stir up controversy and debate, in addition to shining light on the past, on the history of a particular story from which we can learn about the present and future.

And here I see Ihsan Abdel Kouddous and his famous smile covering his entire face and that of whoever he spoke to, holding his translated novel and reading his name and the title in English, declaring, “Yes, this is great.”

Hanan al-Shaykh was born and raised in Beirut. She is an acclaimed novelist and playwright, the author of The Story of Zahra, Women of Sand and Myrrh, Beirut Blues, The Locust and the Bird and Only in London, which was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She lives in London.

Jonathan Smolin is the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor in Asian Studies at Dartmouth College in the US. He is the translator of several works of Arabic fiction, including Whitefly by Abdelilah Hamdouchi, A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me by Youssef Fadel, and I Do Not Sleep and A Nose and Three Eyes by Ihsan Abdel Kouddous and the author of The Politics of Melodrama: The Cultural and Political Lives of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous and Gamal Abdel Nasser (forthcoming Stanford University Press). He lives in Hanover, NH.