Muhammad Makhzangi’s ‘The Smell of the Sun’

The Smell of the Sun by Muhammad Makhzangi

A meditation on time, memory, and the fragile continuity of life

By Mila Fantinelli

In The Smell of the Sun (Rā’iḥat al-Shams, 2025), Egyptian writer Muhammad Makhzangi gathers a lifetime of short pieces, flashes of memory, dreams, and reflections into a luminous and melancholy mosaic. Written over decades but collected now in his seventies, the book feels less like a collection of stories than like the unfolding of a consciousness revisiting itself. These aqṣūṣāt—brief, concentrated narratives—explore the quiet intersections between time and affection, loss and endurance, life and death.

By the time he composed Rā’iḥat al-Shams (2025), Makhzangi had turned inward, like a homecoming after a lifetime of movement. Unlike his earlier works that move outward across continents, such as Safar (1989), Animals in Our Days (2006), Southward and Eastward (2011), this collection moves inward, toward home and belonging. Indeed, many pieces evoke Egypt, the Red Sea, or fleeting domestic scenes with an elegiac tone, where the narrator no longer reports or diagnoses, in line with his medical training, but remembers.

Love as Inheritance

Many of the most moving pieces in the collection revolve around love and affection. As in a bildungsroman, we witness the shaping power of family bonds, such as in “Naguib Mahfouz the Second” and “Ya Abi,” which tenderly revisit the ache and warmth of the paternal figure. These stories trace how the parental presence lingers within us, revealing how inherited gestures and silences mold our becoming.

Then, as if time were folding in on itself, we find the child grown into the parent. In “Play… Seriously!”, the narrator plays a game with his son and almost loses, a fleeting moment that crystallizes the turning of generations and the acceptance of time’s irreversibility. This reflection on the transmission of tenderness across time recalls Egyptian writer Muntasir al-Qaffāsh’s Bi-ṣūra Mufājiʾa (2023), where memories long dormant resurface suddenly, allowing the self to see again, not as repetition, but as renewal.

In Makhzangi, too, remembering becomes a form of seeing: a recovery of vision through tenderness and time, as if the past were not behind us but waiting to be perceived anew. As the narrator surrenders to the flow of memory, as in “Exercise in Affection,” where the faces of loved ones return from the shadows with a warmth more alive than life itself. Across these pieces, time seems to gather two voices: the younger self, speaking in the immediacy of experience, and the older self, observing gently from afar, not judging but cherishing as it recognizes, in that earlier self, something he will always hold with tenderness. In so doing, Makhzangi reveals how the past never truly departs; it lingers.

“Time, which moves forward, turning the future into present, and the present into past, can also retreat and bring our past back to us, if we desire it strongly enough.” (Translation mine.)

Yet memory in Rā’iḥat al-Shams is not confined to the personal. It extends into the shared spaces of pain and displacement. In “Rhythmic Exercises” and “The Guard’s Chair,” prison becomes more than a physical enclosure: it persists in the body, in the way one forgets how to sit, how to rest, how to belong. This private sense of captivity merges with a wider, collective grief in “Qasioun,” where Makhzangi’s Egyptian gaze folds into the broader Arab landscape: Syrian mountains, Palestinian exile, lives suspended between memory and ruin. Here, remembrance turns outward, becoming a form of solidarity with the brokenness of others. The sadness that pervades these stories is not despair but recognition; it is the understanding that all forms of confinement, whether political or psychological, leave traces that time cannot erase.

Time and Transformation in the Animal World and Beyond

The same temporal layering extends to the animal world he portrays: each creature carries a long, unspoken past, not narrated but inscribed in its being. Animals have long been a focus in Makhzangi’s work. In older works like Animals in Our Days (2006) and The Fox’s Hotel (2010), animals were often narrated through a scientific lens, observed with the precision of Makhzangi’s medical eye. In Rā’iḥat al-Shams, however, this dynamic shifts. The animals are no longer subjects of observation but embodiments of time and transformation. In one of the short stories, the lion, once the emblem of strength and sovereignty, now appears stripped of his mane, subdued by age, dissolving peacefully into the landscape. This vision recalls the wisdom of Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmā, who wrote in his Muʿallaqa:

سَئِمتُ تَكاليفَ الحَياةِ، وَمَن يَعِشْ

ثَمانينَ حَولاً لا أَبا لَكَ يَسأَمِ

“I have grown weary of life’s burdens; for whoever lives eighty years, my friend, grows weary indeed.” (Translated from Dīwān Zuhayr ibn Abī Sulmā, ed. ʿAbd al-Salām Harūn, Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1958).

Like Zuhayr’s wise resignation before the weight of years, Makhzangi’s aging lion embodies an acceptance born of endurance, a passage into old age.

Crossing the Threshold

If aging marks the quiet acceptance of time’s flow, departure becomes its natural continuation. Throughout Rā’iḥat al-Shams, movement and letting go are portrayed not as ruptures but as continuations. The sea recurs as a threshold between fear and serenity, where resistance yields to immersion and self dissolves into continuity. For example, in “The Quail,” the last short story of the collection, the final passage brings us to an image of a child running into the sea as two birds take flight, a vision of release that unites life and death.

In Makhzangi’s world, existence unfolds through affection, love, and memory, all leading toward that last serene surrender. Death is therefore not an end but the ultimate form of belonging, the moment when everything returns to the vast, breathing rhythm of life itself.

The titular story in The Smell of the Sun is one of its most delicate, gathering all of Makhzangi’s concerns into a single image. The scent of clothes hung by a mother under the sun becomes a quiet revelation of what remains when the light has faded and life itself begins to dissolve. It is warmth without heat, memory without body, love without possession: the enduring trace of care that outlives both the act and the actor. Thus, time is lost; the older we get, the more tenses intertwine within us, forming a complex image of reality. And if we look across all of Muhammad Makhzangi’s works, this is the book where the boundaries between observer and observed blur most completely. Where life itself seems to look back at us.

Mila Fantinelli is a PhD researcher in Linguistic and Literary Studies at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan. Her research focuses on Arabic literature, ecolinguistics, and the environmental humanities, with a particular interest in the intersections between narrative, stylistics, and ecological thought. She has published on Arabic ecocriticism and ecolinguistic approaches to literary texts, and works as an editor for the European Youth Think Tank, where she writes on corpus linguistics. She also contributes to the blog Arcadiana, dedicated to literature and the arts.