In You Have Been Blocked, the debut novel by popular writer Nawara Negm — daughter of towering literary figures Safinaz Kazem and Ahmed Fouad Negm — explores a collage of different women’s struggles during a single (eventful) day at the Internet Complaints office in Cairo. Her witty, clear style and attention to the minor details of society (family, class, relationships, handbags, religion, everything), as well as quirks of character, make this a tale that is both achingly funny and deeply tragic.
‘Before the Battle’
By Nawara Negm
Translated by James Scanlan
It’s hot.
Sahar has turned the aircon up to full in her small red Beetle, but even so the air spurting out is rancid, like the air from a hair dryer. It rages from the vents into the sweat that’s streaming down her face.
She pulls to the right and stops the car to retrieve a hair tie from her bag. She fixes her hair in a bun, then puts a hand to the back of her neck. It’s damp, so she takes a paper tissue from a pack lying discarded in the footwell and wipes away the sweat.
She looks in the mirror—ah!—her kohl has run. Now she looks “like some cleaning lady,” just as mother had said.
“Put your hair in a ponytail. You’re just going to sweat anyway, and then you’ll have to shove it up in a pile and you’ll look like some cleaning lady.”
She attacks the kohl trickling down from her slender eyes. Her mother’s voice throbs in the back of her head: “You look like a clown in all that paint.”
The makeup was meant to conceal the dark circles under her eyes. But because the kohl now only emphasizes them, the circles have become her defining feature.
Yet the kohl holds, so she wets the tissue with spit. But when it eventually goes, it takes the last of her foundation with it. Now she looks as if she’s made herself up with war paint: a strip under the eyes that’s her natural skin color, while the rest of her face is the color of foundation cream. She’s reluctant to launch another tissue at the problem lest she loses complete control.
“No one’ll notice,” she murmurs to herself.
She turns the key in the ignition and drives off. Her mother’s voice is still there, and laughing: “Why not wear a loose-fitting skirt? Those trousers only tell the world how much you eat… and where you keep it.”
Sahar hadn’t laughed. She’d hurried out the door, and her mother’s words withered behind her.
The square at Abbassia is teeming with people on foot, and Sahar has to beep the horn to clear the way. She’s following her phone’s GPS directions: “Drive straight. In two hundred meters, turn left.”
Though her focus is on the directions, she notices eyes tracking her breasts and hitches up her cotton shirt with her free hand.
“Godspeed to the People’s Breast-feeder!” comes her mother’s sardonic tones again.
Her phone tells her: “You have reached your destination.”
She arrives in a narrow street of grimy two- and three-storey buildings. There are traces of an elegant past: ornate balconies in a style not seen since the 1930s, though the residents have sealed these off with hideous wooden boards, aspiring for more interior space.
Rubble and refuse surround the buildings. Mounds and mounds that probably hide gardens and remnants of withered trees that perhaps once knew a bloom. And Sahar is spellbound.
Her mind plays with fancies, spinning stories of life behind the walls, weaving a history for each building, each story, every window, and every balcony.
On that balcony, for instance, more than sixty years ago, a fair lady once sat in a fabulous dress the color of wine. See her now tying her hair into a chignon. She’s slender. She’s painting her nails to match her dress. She sips tea from a china cup painted with a young man kissing the hand of a girl who’s Medieval, European. She smiles as the smell of morning jasmine drifts by. Her driver is sitting in the automobile below, waiting for her husband, the Bey.
Where is that fair lady now? What about her children? Her grandchildren?
The current denizens are a poor lot, having closed off the balcony to create more space. How many family members are crammed inside? Both mothers-in-law? A father-in-law to boot? And the husband, wife, and their three children? Maybe the husband’s divorced sister and her four children are all in there too. What’s this family’s name?
What about their great-grandfather? What’s his story? The head of this sorry dynasty who left a fortune to his children but, by doing so, ruined theirs.
No doubt some lady, stout and senior in years, sits behind that hideous wooden hoarding, barking at her daughter-in-law to rub cream into her aching knees. She stretches her legs, crying out for comfort in the memory of her mother (dead decades ago), who followed the same maneuvers to ease her rheumatism.
“Are you looking to park, madam?” the lady says.
“Madam. Are you parking?”
Surely not. She must be saying something else.
“Madam! Do you want to park?”
Sahar arrives back on earth.
The face of a man with a thick moustache looms through the glass. He’s wearing a turban wrapped in the prominent Upper Egyptian fashion and a filthy galabeya. Spittle flies from his mouth as he speaks and splatters onto the car window. Sahar thanks God she’d shut it but feels nauseous anyway and—huugkkkh—retches.
This is nothing new: the urge to be sick when provoked by smells, spit, or the build-up of dried saliva in the corner of someone’s mouth. It always sets Sahar’s imagination and OCD racing. It’s embarrassing.
She looks in the rear-view mirror and sees a line of cars honking in outrage. Sahar nods at the man, and his bearing shifts so that he erupts like a drill sergeant with commands of “To me!” and “To you!”
Sahar collects her things in a hurry—phone, earphones, cigarettes—and puts them in her oversized handbag. She exits the car with the aim of asserting some distance between herself and That Spit.
“You will leave the key fob,” he says, as if reading from a transcript. Further spools of spittle fly with the “f” of “fob”. Sahar leaps back, and the man attempts a reassuring smile, which sets forth a band of broken black teeth: the orbiters of a single silver incisor. He introduces himself as “Hassan, the doorman for that building over there.”
Sahar removes the fob from a chain strung with so many keys to so many forgotten doors. She hands it to Hassan, and his rough fingers chafe against hers as she does so. He asks how long she’ll be away. She tells him she’s going to the Internet Complaints office, and he responds with invocations of “La hawla wala quwwata illa billah” and “Hasbi Allah wa na’m al-wakeel,” cursing the sort of godless bastard who could harm a poor, defenseless woman.
She ignores this and asks which way to walk. He raises an arm to the end of the street, and an aroma of chickens blows from within.
Sahar walks quickly in the direction Hassan pointed out; she’s already late for Mamdouh, her lawyer.
The eyes of a boy no older than twelve communicate the rise and fall of her breasts. She pulls up her shirt and strides on, head to the ground, oblivious.
Calls of “You beauty!” pursue her, regardless.
She crosses the road through a line of stationary cars by traffic lights. Mamdouh is waiting for her, smartly dressed in a full suit. They shake hands and Sahar apologizes for being late, smiling, irritable. The smell of lavender hits her. Mamdouh’s shaving cream, presumably. He uses the same one as her ex-husband Ashraf. She feels nauseous again and—this time—doesn’t retch.
Mamdouh gestures for her to go ahead. Sahar hesitates at first but goes ahead anyway, then falls into step behind him when he starts walking. Better that way—for protection. She won’t have to keep pulling up her shirt. The plan crumbles under the probing gaze of the man by the automatic doors. She pulls up her shirt. Mamdouh walks on imperatively, and Sahar follows, eyes down.
“YES?” the man announces.
“Internet Complaints,” Mamdouh says.
The man points to the only conceivable way they could possibly proceed. Sahar catches up with Mamdouh to ask why the man by the door had said “YES?” like that. But she knows the answer already: it’s not easy earning a living as a doorman to an automatic door. One must create side quests for one’s own amusement, such as giving directions to people who don’t solicit them.
The pair climb a set of steps to reach the building’s entrance. To the left of the door, a young man is sitting behind a desk. As they walk toward the lift, he calls after them, “YES?”
“Internet Complaints,” Mamdouh says.
“Floor eight,” the young man says.
“Thank you, sir.”
Sahar can’t resist and chuckles something in Mamdouh’s ear.
“They’re only doing their best,” the lawyer says; he smiles without looking at her.
The lift door opens to reveal a young man by the buttons.
“Floor eight,” Mamdouh says.
“Internet Complaints?” the youth says.
“Yes.”
“You’ll want the eighth floor, then.”
Sahar desperately tries not to laugh as she watches the numbers light up one after the other. She bites back a wry comment (she’s known for making people uncomfortable). Floor eight arrives, and the lift door opens. They exit to find two more young men at a desk opposite.
“Internet Complaints?” Mamdouh says to the pair.
“End of the corridor,” comes the reply in one voice.
At the end of the corridor, Mamdouh and Sahar find a long queue, mostly of women. Mostly young women, some of whom are accompanied by women in middle age. Mamdouh turns to Sahar and asks if she’s brought everything he’d asked her to. Sahar produces a pink USB. He asks her if everything is on it. She nods. He goes through each item one by one:
“The photos?”
“Yes.”
“Voice messages?”
“Yes.”
“Videos?”
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
“Yes.”
“Screenshots of the chats?”
“Yes. All of them.”
The queue is moving slowly. Sahar surveys her surroundings (a usual habit). The building looks new. There’s still paint on the walls. No graffiti. There are no names, no rants against the world, no quotes or proverbs, no sermons telling women that if only they dressed more decently, life would stop being so expensive. No scribbled portents of doom for the people who don’t pray.
The doors are made of glass and aluminum.
“Hideous,” she says.
Mamdouh turns to her with a questioning expression, but she doesn’t respond. They’ve reached the front of the queue. The official is a portly fellow with lank hair parted to one side. He asks, officiously, for their IDs. He receives these and Mahmoud’s lawyer card with short, portly fingers, and chants Sahar’s name back at her as if at a protest: Sahar! Mustafa! Imam! Finally, he gestures for them to move into the waiting area then bellows—“YES?”—at the next person in line.
The waiting area is female and crowded. The orange plastic chairs are new, for now. Mamdouh motions for Sahar to take a seat while he heads to the door leading to the rear stairwell for a cigarette. She watches him go, envious. She hesitates, then stands up and heads for the same door.
“Not here,” Mamdouh says. Unspoken understanding.
Sahar finds herself by a trolley stocked with juices, water, and biscuits: the “buffet.”
“What can I do you for?” says a husky voice from behind.
Sahar twirls around to see a handsome young man in a red checked shirt, pajama bottoms, and bathroom slippers. An empty tray rests on the palm of his left hand.
“Coffee, please,” Mamdouh says.
“And the bride?”
That husky voice.
Sahar is all aflutter. “The bride.” How could he know she prefers this to the ordinary attempts of: “Madame,” “Missus,” or (gosh) “Young lady”? She smiles and asks for a bottle of water, daintily.
That Husky Voice returns her smile, “Right away.”
She accepts the water, eyes to the floor: very demure. As if she’s meeting a teenage flame after years apart. She sits back down.
Ok. No chance of smoking here because she needs to foster sympathy. She opens her bag and fiddles around for her phone. She reaches inside and resurfaces with cigarettes, which she puts back. She fishes out a ten-pound note, puts it back. Then her electricity bill: back in. Then her perfume: back.
Aha! Here’s the phone.
Not a good idea to scroll social media because her phone battery is about to die. She returns the phone to the bag, gloomy in there, and watches the people around her instead. Her attention is drawn to a large beautiful white lady in a hijab. She also notices a pretty young girl who looks a bit like her (much skinnier). Sahar regards the latter with reproach, accusation, skepticism. The skinny girl is nervously flicking through her phone. She finds something and shows it to the larger lady: talking and explaining.
The larger lady isn’t looking at the phone; she’s searching the girl’s face for something. Sahar feels a sudden tightness, witnessing the tragic scene: this girl is being blackmailed, and her mother doesn’t believe a word of it.
She turns away, and her gaze comes to rest on a boy with eyes the shape of almonds. He’s smiling, his pupils glowing. His black eyelashes curve in upward and downward waves. His hair is cut like an officer’s, though he can be no older than thirteen. Next to him is a dark-skinned lady with heavy eyebrows, thin lips, a rectangular face, and the same eyes as her son. She’s dressed conservatively in a loose grey coat and a white silk headscarf that hangs over her shoulders and chest. Sahar considers the lady’s clothes expensive, though the overall effect is drab and military: barracks chic.
Now and then the woman smiles at the boy. There’s history between them—shared jokes, stories remembered, laughter. So-and-so said this, so-and-so did that. She’s his mother, but they’re friends. Sahar smiles. That’s the relationship she’d have wanted with her children, had she had any. That’s the relationship she wanted with her mother, Samira.
Samira is forever busy with the affairs of her husband. Especially his company, which she believes she should be in charge of, really. She’s constantly absorbed in his various . . . vulnerabilities. Caprices that everyone knows about and everyone ignores. She intervenes only when she senses danger. And when she does, Mustafa never knows. Mustafa: Sahar’s father, who drifts through the house like an apparition, smiling, distant. Everything Mustafa gets up to at work and beyond reaches Samira. Samira: so very active in her hunt for intelligence on Mustafa.
Samira wasn’t so very active listening to Sahar tell her she was being blackmailed online. But that didn’t stop her from seeing Sahar leave the house and lecturing her on the principles of dress. With Sahar gone, Samira went about that peculiar routine of hers: praying to her spirit—me—the spirit narrating this tale and watching from above. As Samira asked me to, of course.
Not that Samira bears any blame. She forsook everything for Mustafa, and now she has only him. She abandoned the only true thing of value a citizen of this country has left. Mustafa has no right to abandon her.
“You’re staring at people,” Mamdouh says, taking his seat next to Sahar in another waft of shaving cream. Sahar takes out her perfume and sprays it under her nose. Everyone looks at her. The security guard, languishing behind the door, smiles significantly. Sahar, with equal significance, frowns. She replaces the perfume. The guard calls out the first name. Two teenage girls stand up, and the guard leads them down a different corridor.
Sahar turns to look at a very thin, dark-skinned girl in a hijab, sitting alone and smiling at nothing. Their eyes meet, and the girl’s smile grows. She gets up and comes to sit next to Sahar. The girl is wearing light pink lipstick that doesn’t match her skin tone. She’s wearing a white headscarf, a cream-colored shirt, black trousers made of fake leather, and cheap trainers that are far too big.
Her fingers are thin and ragged from overwork. The veins on her hands are raised and bulging. She asks Sahar why she’s there, but before Sahar can answer her question, the girl asks if the young man beside her is her brother.
“My lawyer,” Sahar says crisply.
“Good,” the girl says, sitting up straight and launching into her tale unprompted.
Sahar examines the girl’s fingernails; they’re long, dirty, and chipped. An immense pity grips Sahar at the thought that this girl wants nothing more than for her nails to grow out and be lustrous, to gleam. But the dream’s hopeless so long as she works with her hands. And works so much. Her fingernails long to be pretty and adored but have to settle for being dull and neglected. It’s sad, and it breaks Sahar’s heart.
Mamdouh listens attentively and with empathy. He’s a good man, Mamdouh. He believes everyone.
But who ever said this girl is speaking the truth?
Nawara Negm is is an Egyptian blogger, activist, and journalist. She graduated from the English Department of the Faculty of Arts, Ain Shams University, and has worked as a news editor and translator for the Nile Information Channel. A popular blogger, before she gave it up, is the daughter of the poet Ahmed Fouad Negm and the writer and critic Safinaz Kazem.
James Scanlan is an Arabic-to-English translator from the UK based in Egypt. He won the 2022 ArabLit Story Prize.