Mohamed Mansi Qandil, on Medicine and Writing

Mohamed Mansi Qandil, on Medicine and Writing

In Conversation

In this conversation with acclaimed Egyptian novelist Mohamed Mansi Qandil, we discuss his latest novel to reach English, The Country Doctor’s Tale, the relationship between doctoring and writing, the novels that shaped him, and why he’d like to see The Country Doctor’s Tale as a film or TV series.

Also: Read an excerpt from the novel in Hewison’s translation and a conversation with Hewison about translating the novel.

So there are a lot of doctor-writers: Anton Chekhov, Yusuf Idris, Nawal El-Saadawi, Ibrahim Nagui  . . . not to mention the dentists. What does working as a doctor bring to bear on a novel, for you? How has being a doctor shaped or informed your writing — beyond the obvious of course, of knowing what a doctor does.

Mohamed Mansi Qandil: I believe medicine and writing are two faces of the same coin. They both move within the same field: the human soul. Medicine is concerned with its physical side, with organs and hormones and enzymes, with the machinery that makes life possible. Literature, on the other hand, is concerned with what cannot be measured so easily: emotions, desires, fear, joy, love, and those rare moments of happiness we encounter only occasionally. Doctors have to understand that patients come to them at their most vulnerable, and that they must guard their privacy carefully. But when a doctor begins to write, they are not writing about one particular patient. They are writing about the illness of a society, about the seed of corruption that distorts everything.

In my novel The Country Doctor’s Tale, I was not speaking about one specific person. I was writing about a sick village: backward, narrow, and afflicted by religious and intellectual fanaticism. Even then, the village was not only itself. It was a model of a whole country suffering from illness.

On the topic of writing and health, this might be a strange question, but I have been thinking about it since  قمر على سمرقند. Your novels, definitely including this one, are particularly interested in women characters — and a wide variety of women characters, from al-Jazya to Fayza al-Tuhami — and their individual pains and illnesses and desires. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising, but a lot of novels by men shy away from women characters, or paint them as objects or symbols. Have you thought about why women characters are so central to your literary worlds? I grant you that we’re half the population, but it’s not the usual thing in a novel. 

MMQ: The question does not seem strange to me at all. Women in Egypt play an enormously important role, though this is not always visible in public life. Inside homes, especially in poorer families, women often carry the whole household. They become the providers, sometimes the only providers. Men scatter their seed and leave. My father did not leave, but his income was modest, so my mother had to manage everything: food, school expenses, and the education of me and my three sisters.

There is something of the spirit of the Isis myth in Egyptian women. They are poor, but they do not surrender. And poverty here is unlike poverty in the West. Very often, it comes close to absolute nothingness. Things became even harder after I entered medical school. I needed more books, more instruments, more things that cost money. Whenever I asked my mother for something, she would say, “Give me two days.” She never failed me, even when the two days became longer. I grew older, and I came to know many kinds of women. Some were tender, others harsh; some faithful, others treacherous. But I loved them all. The world cannot stand upright without them.

Al-Jazya was the kind of woman I was searching for: dignity under humiliating conditions. Fayza al-Tuhami, on the other hand, was the victim, the mark of shame through which I took revenge on the military’s control over our lives and our history. I believed then, and I still believe, that they have forced us into an illicit relationship with them.

Which novels did you grow up loving or admiring? Which novels shaped you as a reader and as a person? 

MMQ: I have always loved all kinds of novels. In fact, much of what I know about the world came to me through them. I read philosophy, science, and history, but my real attachment, my true passion, has always been the art of the novel, especially when it carries a historical breath. I love reading the history of any country. Humanity itself interests me. During the years when reading first shaped me, I was fascinated by Russian literature: Dostoevsky, gloomy as a Russian winter, and Chekhov, with his lightness of spirit despite his fragile health. Later, that passion moved toward Latin American literature: García Márquez, and the whole world of magical realism.

I also read widely in Arabic literature, and I was especially captivated by Naguib Mahfouz, particularly his early novels about Pharaonic history, which people do not usually pay much attention to. I loved his novel The Struggle of Thebes, about Ahmose, the hero who liberated Egypt from the Hyksos invaders. It is a strongly melodramatic, nationalist novel. Of course, it is not among his greatest works, and almost no one talks about it. Perhaps it was never even translated. But for a long time, I dreamed of writing something like it. I have a plan to write a novel about the building of the pyramids. I still do not know what the right entry point will be, but I keep gathering material. One day, I will write it. A writer cannot possess such an immense history and leave it unused.

يوم غائم في البر الغربي was adapted into a TV series. Would you want to repeat that with The Country Doctor? If so, how do you imagine it, as a film or TV? 

MMQ: It was not the only one. My novel I Loved was also adapted into a television series, and a novella of mine was made into a film called A Girl from Israel. As the title suggests, it touches on politics, and it is usually shown on television whenever relations with Israel become tense.

In general, I was not pleased with the final form these adaptations took. I even said so publicly on television. But I think I was wrong. Books do not reach a very wide audience in Egypt, because of illiteracy and economic hardship. Television, however, helped the books travel further. It led to new editions and introduced me to people who had never heard of me before. So yes, I would like The Country Doctor’s Tale to become a film or a television series. For me, this is one of the few ways to cross the barriers of illiteracy and the weakness of reading culture.

Might I ask about prizes? يوم غائم في البر الغربي was shortlisted for the Arabic Booker, but after that you have stayed a bit off the radar of international prizes. Why is that? And how do you feel about literary prizes? 

MMQ: Literary prizes in our part of the world have a great deal to do with luck, and very little, I think, to do with literary value.

What is your relationship to the book in translation? How do you see it? As your book, as Neil’s, as something else? Do you have a relationship with your English-language readership? 

MMQ: Three of my novels have been translated into English, but I have never really received any response to them. I do not know whether they were properly distributed, whether they were read, or whether they simply did not have the quality needed to reach readers. But I am optimistic about this latest novel, The Country Doctor. Neil translated it with a great deal of professionalism, and he drew on his own cultural background to give the language a certain poetic quality. I read the English text with real pleasure, almost as if I were not the original author. What I discovered is that we are partners in the text now. It is still my book, of course, but in English it also carries something of Neil’s spirit. Perhaps this will help the novel travel further. I hope so.

This book was written under Covid lockdown (or so it says at the end?). Did that change your process at all — not being able to travel to see the places you were writing about?

MMQ: I relied on memory alone while writing this novel: the memories of the time I spent as a doctor in that village. I did not try to go back, because I did not want to find that the place had changed over the years. Returning would have been difficult during the pandemic, but it was not impossible. Still, I became convinced that there was no point in trying. It might have disturbed the images stored in my memory, blurred them, or replaced them with something less true. And as you know, imagination is the essential material of every story.