Here, in an essay that originally appeared in Ultrasawt, Moaaz Muhammad explores the literature of legendary Egyptian writer Ragaa Elish, who declared in his short-story collection: Don’t Be Born Ugly. Tomorrow, we have an excerpt of Don’t Be Born Ugly in Osama Hammad’s translation.
Ragaa Elish vs Society’s Demons:
Self-Alienation and the Illness of the Collective
By Moaaz Muhammad
Translated by Osama Hammad
Ragaa Elish (1932-1979) believed that his ugliness was what pushed people to deny him their sympathy. Because this virtue, as he thought, was only performed toward a beautiful person.
At the beginning of 1955, Erich Fromm published The Sane Society, where he discussed various notions and questions about the healthy society and the sick one, the sane individual and the mad one, and the types of individuals our modern societies produced. Although Fromm discussed western societies exclusively, his analysis crossed borders to describe humans amid capitalism and consumerism.
Fromm described his goal in writing this book as a continuation of what Sigmund Freud started in Civilization and its Discontents, which is about how culture and civilization clash with the needs of the individual and their psychological build. Freud wondered if someday someone would take the risk of exploring health conditions in civilized societies, which Fromm did, questioning how successful a civilization was in fulfilling the deep needs of the individual.
We all think that we were born in societies that have privileges our ancestors never had—which might be true, at least in part—but we brush off the mental and social taxes we pay, which our ancestors evaded. And while the people of the world now claim they are closer than ever to each other through the miracle of technology, instant communication, travel and trade, they seem to be more alienated than free—more than at any other time. The irony is that the more a society advanced economically and rose up in the modernity ladder, the more an existential anxiety and alienation erupted like a volcano, as if it were a curse.
Alienation seems to be an inescapable tax, a part of the consequences and impacts of capitalism on the contemporary personality, which is overwhelmingly characterized by emotional imbalance and the lack of meaning, more than at any other time in history. Fromm wonders how contemporary societies relate to this feeling, and whether it is our responsibility as individuals or a side effect of the lifestyle imposed on us. He also discusses the contradictions between the natural origins of human beings, from which we’ve been separated, and the ordinary life under the domination of modern society.
Fromm disagrees with the mainstream opinion among psychologists that a society does not contract sickness, and that the misfit individuals are always the problem. Fromm suggests that a society could have ailments, but that we do not notice them because the imposed mainstream culture provides a model for individuals to live inside without noticing its defects.
“It is as if each culture provided the remedy against the outbreak of manifest neurotic symptoms which would result from the defect produced by it.”
Every culture provides a world of entertainment that suppresses the emergence of the side effects of living under modern societies’ domination. If movies, radios, TVs, sports games, and newspapers disappeared for just four weeks, we might witness thousands of mental breakdowns and acute anxiety among people; as if these sedatives were mere means to escape reality in the first place. If those were the tools to accommodate and adapt to the aggressive lifestyle in modern societies for the majority, what could the misfits do to live in their society’s mainstream culture? Those who did not find remedy in the cultural sedatives and couldn’t find a sufficient alternative to adapt to this alienation—how does society perceive them?
I Was Born Ugly
Muhammad Ragaa Elish was born around 1932, to a wealthy family that primarily traded in gold. And unlike the stereotype of the impoverished tormented novelist, money was not the reason behind Elish’s crises; it was ugliness. The internet does not provide a reliable image of the unknown literary writer, and even the portrait of an ugly person on his publications is a figment of the artist’s imagination. So, we do not know if he was actually ugly, or if this is how he perceived himself.
Mustafa Abdallah, the editor of the literature section at Akbar al-Youm, described him in an interview with the journalist Khariy Hassan as: “A bald giant, hiding an estranged sad gaze behind his medical glasses.” Elish wrote in the preface to his short-story collection Don’t Be born Ugly”: “Imagine the weirdest man in the world… The ugliest face you would encounter on the earth, and you would be certain it’s me… The forever laughingstock, the forever weird… I have always been the weirdest… most hideous… and the ugliest.”
Elish lived a lonely life and was cast out by his family. No one treated him decently except his mother, to whom he dedicated his short-story collection Don’t Be Born Ugly. In the preface we read the letters he never dared to send to their actual recipients. We read his letter to a lover who never showed up; a letter to his father, blaming him for bringing him to this world. And we then read the father’s response, as imagined by Elish, before he started writing a long manifesto attacking the society which he thought was the reason behind his misery.
Elish believed that his ugliness was what pushed people to deny him their sympathy. Because this virtue, he thought, was only performed toward a beautiful person. And in many places in his stories, Elish talked about his different personal understanding of humanity which he said, at its deepest level, was completely corrupt.
Elish devoted himself to literature and reading, searching for literary recognition and social integration, but this never happened. So, he decided to leave Cairo and our world on October 21st, in a violent and bizarre way. He blew up both of his apartments in Heliopolis using cooking-gas containers and benzene, waking the residents of Muhammad Farid and Abdel-hamid Abu-Heif with massive explosions. The story did not end there; he closed his explosive show a suicide on Baghdad Street, where he shot himself in the head inside his red Mazda.
The unusual way Elish ended his life was not just a suicide, it was a complete artistic show and a strongly worded message against society. There were not only the explosions—Elish also left a note to society in his safe, in which he wrote: “The society turned into devils, chasing me everywhere.”
He continued: “I want to beat up this society; there are no innocents, they are all, to some degree, criminals. It’s fair to say that everyone who looked at or contacted me devastated a part of my humanity, made a crack in my polished glass, stabbed my sad heart with a poisoned harpoon, held me down and made me lose hope in life.” He added: “I lived as a weird spectacle in your eyes as you did in mine. This is the crime the society where I lived committed. In the end, I say: I’m not the criminal. It’s the cruel society.”
Elish’s case is closely related to Fromm’s analysis of societal alienation in modern societies, to the extent that his tragic end, perhaps, is the most extreme embodiment of the fate a society could impose on a misfit member, for whatever reason.
In the following paragraphs, I’ll try to offer a detailed analysis of the short-story collection Don’t Be Born Ugly. I’ll use Fromm’s book to analyze the writer’s personality, his notions, and his relationship with society, highlighting the features of the alienation he felt and how he expressed it in a fascinating literary language.
Ragaa Elish: Was He an Explosive Novelist?
If we tried to approach Elish’s mind, we would smell the sulphurous scent of explosions. He was so obsessed with the notion of blowing something up that the word explosion was repeated 16 times in his collection Don’t Be Born Ugly in different contexts. Even when he wanted to describe how strongly he opposed society, he wrote that he was a creature made of: “a fast-welding substance, designed to withstand the most dangerous and the most horrible explosions.”
And If we connect this collection to the life of its writer, it’s clear that he included his personal thoughts about himself and society. Each story details an obsession that overtook his mind. And so, through one story after another (10 stories in this collection), we find ourselves on a tour inside Elish’s tormented mind, as if we were wandering through a room, looking at his suffering.
In the third chapter of his book, Fromm discusses the needs a human being should fulfill to protect themselves from madness. When a human being fulfills their physical needs—hunger, thirst and sex—they transcend their animalistic state of existence. But they still need to fulfill other needs that emerge from existing in a society, which should be fulfilled to keep the mind in a sane state; the need to communicate with other human beings and establish a loving relationship and bond. Fromm describes the mad person as “the one who failed to form a bond of any sort.”
In the ninth story in his collection, “Hunger,” Elish shows what Fromm meant by the failure to bond with the society through his protagonist who hangs out in streets, cinemas, and cafes searching for a human being to engage with in conversation; or an eye to meet his eye for a moment; or an exciting scent of a woman to tickle his senses.
But his eyes always returned “with obvious disappointment, as usual.” The protagonist is a man whose need for intimacy and love almost suffocates him because his society denied him those feelings. He imagines himself burning the city down with its colossal buildings to take revenge on its residents by watching them, horrified, while he stands high atop a place where fire can not reach him.
We can understand the sensation of food-deprivation from the word hunger, but he felt the hunger for companionship and love. And while he expresses his hunger to break his loneliness, he encounters other people in the city who suffer different types of hunger. It is as if the people of Cairo, as Elish thought of them, were just monkeys looking for something to silence their hunger, no matter what it was. Elish predicts his own fate when he describes his protagonist: “Sometimes he feels like a ticking bomb that will go off at any moment, anywhere. He does not know when, but he is certain it will happen.”
The alienated protagonist is in search of a city of his own, to replace the corrupt city where no one loved him. This is a type of alienation that appears in another story, “The Ugly Man and the People.” Unlike in “Hunger,” where the focus is on his alienation from society and its values as a whole, here, the alienation is directed toward individuals. Elish describes himself as: “A different, strange human being, expecting very special treatment from other people.” This is a person who does not dare to walk next to his lover in the street, an underground rat.
The story has a clear, aggressive, Kafkaesque quality. Anxiety, nervousness, fear, and self-deprecation are the protagonist’s companions. He describes himself as, “An ugly human, treated with hostility by society just because he is different.” Thus, it seems that the story explores the duality of alienation: “me against society.” The society violently oppresses the protagonist, and this pressure eventually pushes him to commit a crime.
The Human and Their Inner Self
In his fifth chapter, Fromm moves from analyzing the needs of the human being to looking at the conditions of the individual in a modern capitalist society—how they look at other human beings, how they communicate with their inner selves, and the hierarchical authority in contemporary industrial societies. Capitalism, since its inception in the 17th century, has participated in shaping the individual, that is the current “us.” Not only economically, but our cultural practices as well.
Slowly, capitalism successfully imposed its narrative of what a human being should look like. And although the world has witnessed drastic changes in how money is managed and moved around, these were not the only changes; other changes to human nature and traditional social ties also occurred. Probably, the most significant thing humans lost is their relationship with inner selves.
Fromm brings in Henrik Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt,” in which the playwright criticizes the modern human and his desperate laborious pursuit of material gains, during which he loses himself and does not realize it until it’s too late. The relationship between the human being and his inner self is the subject of one of Elish’s short stories, “Who Owns The House.” In it, Elish writes about a young doctor who owns a great mansion that hides him away from people, to the extent that if he made love to his wife in the garden, no one would see them.
The story begins at a party, which the owner of the house and his wife held to show off the mansion. Elish expounds upon the pride he saw reflected in people’s eyes because this man owned a huge mansion, which defined his social value, while they lived in small nests and paid the price for living in them, to avoid eviction at the beginning of each month. The protagonist had fulfilled all the dreams a modern individual could wish for: a high-paying job, a great mansion, a beautiful wife, and the latest-model car. But suddenly he loses his balance and is unable to feel happiness for some unknown reason, as if he had lost it on his journey. His imbalance manifests in how he chases the ants that dig up the sand on his property, and even in how he watches the owl in his garden, because he feels it staring at him.
The story embodies the concept of losing oneself during the labor for material possessions, and it deconstructs the concept of private property that the modern society preaches; it seems to express the idea that the carrot we are running after and think will bring happiness to our lives is just an illusion.
Fromm writes in The Sane Society: “Many cases of suicide are caused by the feeling that life has been a failure, that it is not worthwhile living any more; one commits suicide just as a businessman declares his bankruptcy when losses exceed gains, and when there is no more hope of recuperating the losses.”
Fromm presents the notion of “balance” as a tool with which modern humans evaluate their lives; this balance, as he presents it, is the answer to the question: Is life worth living? Society provides a standard perception of any individual’s worth, which is how much money they make, to qualify them to join a social class; this formula is what defines failure and success.
Fromm explores the French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s opinion on the reasons for suicide in modern societies, describing the people living under the modern political state as “irregular dust of individuals,” indicating the decomposition of all mainstream social systems of the old world, which kept the individual’s perception of his self worth. But Fromm adds the concept of “balance” to explain the high rates of suicide in the contemporary age.
Suicide and the concept of value are present in “He Who Committed Suicide,” the sixth story in Don’t Be Born Ugly. This is a story about an employee who embezzled from his employer and then has to live with his feelings of shame and fear that society might discover his secret. All through the story, the employee details how he became obsessed with his coworkers’ reactions and what they meant, his plans to commit suicide because, if he were exposed, it would destroy whatever value he had to his daughter, his wife, and others. At some point in his story, Elish echoes what Fromm mentioned about the concept of balance when he describes his protagonist: “He kept comparing the two types of shame, as he would inevitably fall into one of them: the shame caused by his death, and the shame he would feel while living exposed among people.”
Ragaa Elish’s Manifesto
Elish’s short-story collection is not just an abstract literature; it is engaged writing that expresses the crisis of the individual in contemporary society, and it carries among its layers “the personal and the collective.” In Elish’s literature, the individual does not exist on their own, but rather as part of a society, even if it rejects them.
The stories read like a string pulled out of the protagonist’s chest, reaching toward the people around him. Sometimes, Elish steps outside of his inner self and shifts the focus of his story to someone else, as in “Elbah,” a short story about a shoe polisher in a bar, in which a drunken writer, who spent his nights drinking with his friends, decided to write the life story of a man who lived completely on the margins, almost invisible amidst the chaos and crowds of society—a man committed to his personal values, but crushed by the waves of society.
At some point, the story moves among protagonists who are in crisis: because of their ugliness, because of embezzlement, or even because they were married to the wrong person or wanted to commit suicide. Whatever the reason, they all shared a great crisis: The cruel treatment from society and their inability to adapt to its widespread ills.
Elish’s protagonists are all alienated characters. They belong to different social classes, neighborhoods, and professions, but they are all “outcasts” seeking to escape. The characters attempt to elude madness and violent thoughts, aspiring to be normal, but they always fail.
Elish inserted his prophecies for his own future into his stories, as where he narrates the internal monologue of a person about to commit suicide using a gun, which Elish did in the late seventies, when he shot himself four times in the head, and only the fourth shot managed to penetrate his skull. Elish’s stories are a violent social protest against the attributes of modern society and the laws that define the relationships between its individuals.
And like every “unadapted individual” who refuses to join the herd, they must be accused of madness at some point, and Elish was no different. He disinherited his family in his “explosive” will, ordering a million pounds to be distributed among the Writers Union, the Literary Writers Association, and the literature section at al-Akhbar newspaper. He also allocated part of the money for an annual prize for new writers that carried his name.
Like his life, his will was violently sabotaged; the Writers Union ignored the message he sent before he committed suicide, so he had to register it with the public notary; al-Akhbar rejected his donation on the pretext that he was an infidel for killing himself, hence, it was not permissible to use his money!
His family filed a lawsuit in family court, accusing him of madness for writing them out of his will. In his grounds for judgement, the judge described Ragaa’s case as: “As to the way he died, it was a scream of protest against a society in which he was no longer able to fit and live in harmony with. Thus, it’s not an indication of his madness, but rather his sanity!”
Yet, the family won the case at the court of appeals. Here, the first question in Fromm’s book arises: Who is the ill in this case—Ragaa or Egyptian society? Is it possible for an individual to be sane while the society around them is sick?
I believe that Elish’s case shows clearly that his crisis was living in a worn-out society which considered his ugliness a problem and punished him for it his entire life. A person who felt alienated his entire life, as he sent messages in every direction, but they were sent back to the sender with no response.
Elish’s case is a model for the impact the mainstream culture has on the individual’s mental health. He tried to push back with art and literature, yet he failed. He fits Fromm’s description of a certain type of character who feels alienated, since they were built different; thus, their conflicts and nature are different from the nature and conflicts of the majority. Therefore, a remedy that could succeed in healing most people may not work for him.
We find among this group individuals who have integrity and sensitivity that surpasses that of the majority, which makes them unable to consume the cultural drugs. At the same time, they are not strong enough or healthy enough to live in peace, “against the flow.”
Moazz Muhammad is an Egyptian writer and researcher born in Yemen. He wrote for several websites including Mada Masr and Megazen. Moazz contributed to several studies and reports issued by civil society organizations.
Osama Hammad is a literary translator based in Egypt. Holding a Professional Diploma in Media and Audiovisual Translation from the School of Continuing Education at the American University in Cairo. He published several translated short stories and articles in both Arabic and English, as well as collaborative efforts in translating two Arabic books. Osama is a contributor to ArabLit, Boring Books and Antonym.
This essay originally appeared in Ultrasawt.
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