From ‘The Many Lives of Ibrahim Nagui’

It’s publication day for Samia Mehrez’s The Many Lives of Ibrahim Nagui: A Journey with My Grandfather, translated to English by Eleanor Ellis. This excerpt, from the chapter “Houma and Souma,” explores the myth of the great love story between Samia’s famous grandfather, the poet and physician Ibrahim Nagui, and her grandmother. It was a story promoted for many years by her mother, who shared particular selections from Nagui’s letters with the press.

However, when Samia read through all the letters, she formed a different view of their relationship.

One might wonder: Why did Nagui write to her in French? Did he think that she was proficient in French because she’d studied briefly at Les Franciscaines de Marie—even though in all likelihood she had never written a letter before? Was it to show off his third language, which he’d taught himself to communicate with his childhood sweetheart? Nagui makes all sorts of errors in French that show he’s new to writing in the language, yet he’s also developed a fairly expansive lexicon by these two letters. It almost seems as if he’s lifting expressions directly from novels he’s read in French: His sentences are cumbersome and his elaborate vocabulary seems out of place in a simple love letter.

I imagine my grandmother receiving that first letter. She doesn’t respond, claims his letter never arrived, and sends him a telegram instead of keeping her promise to write every day. My poor grandmother! The traditional young bride, appropriately reticent, and uncertain of her French, with a poet-doctor husband pouring out his lonely longing. Even if she had been proficient in French, how could she possibly reply?

The most surprising thing about these letters and telegrams from a contemporary perspective is that they arrived, and on time. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the postal service was a reliable enough institution that my grandparents could depend upon it for this intensive correspondence. My grandfather never wondered if my grandmother’s replies had been lost in the mail; he is quite certain the lack of a response from her simply meant that she was not writing.

After these first two letters, my grandfather gave up writing in French and switched to Arabic. He continued to regularly send my grandmother effusive love letters over the next two years.

My mother told me that later on, after the couple settled in Cairo, my grandfather found two tutors to come to the house to improve my grandmother’s French and Arabic, based on what he had realized about the gaps in her proficiency from their correspondence.

It is clear from the letters that Nagui was quite concerned with educating his wife and encouraged her to read and engage with literature. He personally read to her sometimes, told her about what he was reading, or taught her about meter through the poetry he was writing. These letters shed light on what he was reading and how he spent his time away from her. In one letter dated 9 December 1928, Nagui wrote:

My dear Souma,

I left you this morning, not knowing how I’d go back home without you, my guardian angel. You keep me company in my solitude, and your face lights up this dreary world. I was sitting alone on the train wondering how I’d bear everything now that I’ve gotten used to you being beside me, your head on my shoulder, falling asleep as I read to you or told you about what I’d read.

The funny thing is that he seems happy she was falling asleep as he read. Perhaps this sounds romantic at first glance, but she also doesn’t seem to have been very interested in listening, and he doesn’t seem to have realized this. Love is blind, I guess.

The next letter, written in Arabic, also spoke to Nagui’s persistent efforts to win my grandmother over to reading. I found this letter, dated 10 December 1928, particularly fascinating.

To my heart, my dearest Souma,

I am writing you a second letter. God only knows whether you think of me as I think of you. Yesterday evening when I went home, the house felt terribly empty and desolate without your charming presence. Whenever I saw any of your clothes hanging around the house, I kissed them and wept. I didn’t go out that evening because I was really tired and ‘Amm Ali stayed over. I only had tea for dinner. Everything was in the kitchen cabinet but I realized you had the key, so I gave him some money yesterday to get what we needed and again today so we could have a small lunch. 

I’ve been really restless and couldn’t settle on a book. I kept putting one down and picking up another until I began this wonderful Italian short story by Grazia Deledda, “Two Men and a Woman.” 6 The protagonist shows a nobility of character that reminded me of you. In the story, a man falls in love with a woman and commits forgery for her sake. He is sentenced to prison and when he goes to jail, the prison warden, who is a harsh man, turns out to have the same name he does. When the girl writes her fiancé a series of sweet letters, the warden opens them. And since she is pretending to be the young man’s sister in the letters, the warden falls in love with her. He is inspired by her gentle spirit to try to get the young man released. He does all this hoping to marry the prisoner’s “sister.” One day the girl sends a photo of herself to the boy, her imprisoned lover. The warden is astounded by her beauty and doesn’t give the prisoner the photo. Eventually the warden summons the young man and tells him he’s received orders to release him and then reveals his love for the girl and explains that he wants to marry her. The young man is afraid to say that she’s his fiancée but promises that he’ll try! He also figures it would be better for the girl if she married the warden anyways because he—the prisoner—is a poor chap without the kind of standing that the warden has. So the next day he goes to the warden and tells him the whole story and explains that the girl is his fiancée but that he still wants to ask her opinion and see if she’d rather marry the warden. It’s important to him to let her choose because he owes the warden a debt for his release and also because the warden is a better choice for marriage. The warden is taken aback by this chivalry and says: My boy, don’t write that to her, because if she agrees to marry me after all this, she won’t be the lovely noble person she was in the letters. Anyways, it’s only fair she marries you after you’ve been imprisoned so long on her account. May God grant you all happiness, and bring me fortune!

It’s a nice story, right?

Kisses and hugs to you, dear Souma. I love you, I love you, I love you! Ibrahim

Houma . . . and Souma! They were kissing before they came down for lunch with everybody.

To hell with Sami!

In this letter, my grandfather uses simple language to summarize what is in fact a very profound piece of literature—Grazia Deledda was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1926. It surprises me that only two years later, her writings were already available in Mansoura. Had Nagui read Deledda in the French translation? Had her work already been translated into Arabic? Or had he read the story in Italian, which he’d also taught himself? In “Nagui Chronicles His Life,” he explains:

A doctor asked me to translate an important Italian article on a case involving a medical professional and the government. I began to read Italian with an Italian friend until I could accurately translate the report in question to help the case. In the corner of my library is a small handbook for learning Italian, which my friend’s daughter gave to me. What a strange creature fate is! I wonder where Olga, the book’s former owner, is now?

Whichever translation Nagui had read, the fact that he was reading Deledda in 1928 is important because it demonstrates that he was engaged with international literature; he would later go on to translate various works. It is also revelatory of the broader linkages between cultural and literary spheres in Egypt (including in Mansoura) and elsewhere, and the circulation of these European books in Egypt.

The curious thing about Deledda’s story is that it was a story about letters, and specifically about the power of letters to elicit strong feelings and shape fates. Meanwhile, Nagui was living his own epistolary relationship. The difference of course was that my grandmother scarcely wrote to him—she does not seem to have taken any hints from the comparison Nagui makes with the story’s protagonist in his letter.

The book is available from AUC Press; this excerpt appears with permission.

Samia Mehrez is professor emerita of Arabic literature in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations and founder of the Center for Translation Studies at the American University in Cairo (2009–2021). She is the author of Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction (AUC Press, 1994) and Egypt’s Culture Wars (2008), and the editor of The Literary Atlas of Cairo, The Literary Life of Cairo, and Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir (AUC Press, 2010, 2011, 2012).

Eleanor Ellis is an Arabic-English translator. She holds an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University.