By M Lynx Qualey
Each anthology of near-future fiction in Comma Press’s “Futures Past” series has had a distinctly different flavor. The stories in Iraq + 100, ed. Hassan Blasim, are set in 2103, a hundred years after the disastrous US-led invasion, and many of them map the catastrophic aftereffects of this war. Palestine + 100, ed. Basma Ghalayini, is set a hundred years after the 1948 Nakba, and its authors explore the meaning of occupation, time, and truth. Kurdistan + 100, ed. Orsola Casagrande and Mustafa Gündoğdu, is set 100 years after the short-lived Republic of Kurdistan; many of these stories center the authoritarian erasure of culture and language.
Egypt + 100, edited by author and filmmaker Ahmed Naji and published this month, is set in January 2111, a hundred years after protesters filled public squares around Egypt. In these twelve stories, seawaters rise; people abandon their cities for virtual spaces; Tahrir Square is replaced by a Colosseum where men fight to the death; buildings twist and shift. If there is a shared obsession in this twelve-author collection, it is the nature and meaning of public space.
In Mansoura Ez Eldin’s disturbing “The Wilderness Facilities,” translated by Paul Starkey, we find a future that has eroded both public and private spaces. People have largely abandoned the streets and shopping centers for their homes. Yet at home, too, they are observed. On their days off, they get to become the observers, traveling to the titular “Wilderness Facilities,” a prison where dissenters are kept in a labyrinthine structure of glass and endless staircases. Although the visitors must be coming in groups, each person remains separate from the others, watching the prisoners from behind binoculars.
In this future Egypt, prisoners don’t get walls, because “walls give a sense of security” and the controlled outdoors “inflicts the ultimate punishment and loss[.]” This is a deeply authoritarian and alienating future in which there are no real connections, and the only conversations are between prisoners and those keeping them imprisoned.
Virtual space replacing the tangible
Alienation and the loss of public space are themes to which several Egypt + 100 authors return. In Azza Sultan’s “The Sky Room,” translated by Elisabeth Jaquette, people live in a high-rise world of mirrors and facades, where they see nothing but reflections of themselves. Public space is restricted, such that people are allowed to walk outdoors only once a week. The result is an erosion of relationships, memory, and history.
In Nora Nagi’s imaginative and oddly hopeful “Unicorn2512,” translated by Mayada Ibrahim, people are even more isolated. They live in tiny apartments, their bodies hooked up to something akin to life support, while their minds roam a virtual world. Only a few refuseniks remain outside, in a place called the House of Noncompliance; one of these was the narrator’s mother. For the most part, people have been inside the virtual world so long—harvesting diamonds, exchanging imaginary goods, adopting new “careers” week by week—that the shared space of language is also disappearing.
Yet in an act of sudden self-recognition, Unicorn2512 realizes she will soon die and, before she does, she wants to tell a story. At first, she considers telling her mother’s story, and we see the last time she walked in the shared physical world, to say goodbye to her mother. But ultimately, this isn’t her mother’s story: it’s her own. Improbably, yet believably, her defiant act of self-creation generates a shared virtual space which spills beautifully into the real.
Bread, circuses, and dictators
In Ahmed El-Fakharany’s filmic “Everything is Great in Rome,” translated by Robin Moger, people are still living in the tangible world, although not one we would recognize. In this story, a futuristic Coliseum replaces Tahrir Square. Now, when people gather, it is not to interact with one another, but to watch—and bet on—fights to the death.
At the same time, the country’s long-time leader has removed himself from the public gaze and disappeared into the past. He lives in a remote palace that is filled with Orientalist bric-a-brac; its windows are mirrored, so that those inside can observe without being observed. While the world outside rushes forward, this ancient palace seems to be keeping the dictator frozen in time.
Ultimately, the president and the country’s best fighter must meet in the Coliseum in a gruesome final match. Here, public space is deftly replaced with public spectacle, and the interactions we see are all tightly controlled by the leader’s inner circle.
Climate change
In nearly all the stories, Egypt’s natural geography has also changed. In several, climate change is a central mover.
In Michel Hanna’s “Encounter with the White Rabbit,” translated by Mohammed Ghalayini, we find a world with echoes of Ahmed Khaled Tawfik’s popular 2009 novel, Utopia. In Hanna’s story, a man leaves the protected enclave of the “Capital” to visit a wild and collapsed Cairo. Unlike in Utopia, Hanna’s protagonist isn’t out to find amusement; he aims to track down a rare cancer treatment for his wife. Thus, the privileged narrator must navigate his way through a landscape filled with corrugated-tin huts, deafening loudspeakers, and the “stench of sweat, rot, dirt and vehicle grease.”
We first meet him outside its walls, so we don’t know what the “Capital” looks like, only that old Cairo provides a shocking contrast. Here, there are swamps, ruins, and a few iconic buildings that remain intact, such as the Davies Bryan Building, built in 1910, and the Mogamma governmental building on Tahrir Square. Although there are shared spaces here—such as the “airport,” a loud field crowded with low-flying tuktuks—our hero finds nowhere and no one he can trust, only a chaos of people trying to take advantage of him.
The cold future of parenting
One form of connection that still exists in some of these near-future Egypts is the parent-child relationship. Although Unicorn2512 struggles to recall her own name, she still remembers her mother.
But in other stories, even this relationship has eroded. In Mohamed Kheir’s chilly and compelling “The Mistake,” the protagonist is one of only a few Egyptians to have a child. Others have given up parenthood in protest, as “the only resistance to the status quo.” And while the protagonist and his wife were part of that movement, she got pregnant and decided to keep the baby.
In public spaces, all eyes are on the protagonist and his child. And while his daughter still seems to have a childish mien, other children have changed: “On the rare occasions when he saw children, it almost seemed like they were merely very short adults, the impression reinforced by the prevailing silence and stillness that their shy parents had bestowed on them.” In this story, the whole country has taken on a sterile feeling. When the man and his daughter reach a public square outside the train station, it is “wide, cool, and bright.” The one messy thing that remains in this landscape is love. Ultimately, it is not the relationship with his daughter that moves the protagonist to take action, but his love for his mistake-making wife.
Meanwhile, in Camellia Hussein’s quietly horrifying “Mama,” translated by Basma Ghalayini, we see a bizarre version of Egyptian motherhood where children are meant to be turned over to the state. Here, Egypt is Mama, and all children must look like the leader, Papa. The narrator avoids this fate by taking pills to terminate her child. But then, when the fetus slips out of her, she slow-motion panics. “I didn’t think I’d have to face getting rid of him again. I thought he was going to slide out of me invisibly, but he fell on the floor in front of my eyes. I was forced to look.”
This character, like so many in the collection, is entirely alone. The only other living people she sees are the chanting mob she glimpses when she looks down off her balcony.
Future fatwas, future museums
Yet not all the stories promise a cold and alienating future. In two freewheeling satiric works, climate change is real, but it hasn’t stopped people from being ridiculous.
In Belal Fadl’s mockumemoir “God Only Knows,” translated by Raph Cormack, the narrator is a mufti of the future, answering questions and authoring fatwas like his father and grandfather before him. Unlike his pioneering ancestors, the narrator has mastered the art of careful fence-sitting, or, “what I prefer to call (in football terminology) being more responsive in the midfield.”
Naturally, the story underlines how fatwas change with the times. In 2052, the year the narrator was born, his father issued a ruling “forbidding fasting during the day for Ramadan if the temperature exceeded 50 degrees centigrade[.]” Although this ruling was initially met with resistance, it was later credited with saving millions of lives. By contrast, in the 2070s, when his father issued a fatwa permitting same-sex marriage, the population accepted it with equanimity. After all, everyone experienced “the constant struggle to stay alive and not die of thirst, suffocate in the deadly heat, or get killed by one of the criminal gangs[.]” These things “did not distinguish between people with homosexual and heterosexual desires.”
Several of the questions the narrator gets asked are enjoyably ludicrous, but he’s compelled to take them seriously, carefully avoiding any rulings that might make him the target of an assassination attempt. While “God Only Knows” is more of a ramble than a traditional short story, the narrator’s wry voice buoys us through.
The collection ends with editor Ahmed Naji’s spoof-comic “The Tanta White People Museum,” translated by Rana Asfour. In this story, white people have been forced to flee their countries thanks to, among other things, the racist anti-vaxxers of the future. Some of these white refugees end up in the mid-sized Egyptian city of Tanta, where some pale-skinned newcomers are not welcomed with open arms. Some of these don’t even work to make themselves agreeable and attempt to reject local norms: “White Americans, for example, were forced to acquire free health insurance, which they regarded as contrary to the teachings of Christ and the American Constitution.”
Sadly, not everyone is keen on the opening of the Tanta White People Museum, which aims to celebrate the contributions of Egypt’s pale-skinned refugees. Indeed, a masked terrorist has gone so far as to place a bomb beneath the interactive Steve Bannon statue. Fortuately, the most valuable part of the museum is preserved in the cloud. This is “The Wall,” since after all “nothing has been more central” to whiteness than the erection of walls, as “without them there would be no white culture.”
And, not to worry: everything turns out AOK for Tanta’s white people in the end.
Other stories in the collection include Heba Khamis’s beautifully creepy “Drowning,” translated by Maisa Almanasrah; Ahmed Wael’s tale of exile and return, “The Solitude of Prince Boudi,” translated by Raphael Cohen; and Yasmine El Rashidi’s description of the past from the vantage of the future: “Oral History of a Past, Obsolete and Forgotten.”
Taken together, these twelve stories, crafted in markedly different styles, create a portrait of the anxieties of different contemporary Egyptian writers: of the loss of community and shared memory; of extremes of surveillance and control; of the devastating potential of climate change; and of future versions of Egyptian cities that don’t leave room for people to gather, to protest, and to forge new demands for the future.
