Written shortly after Nasser’s death, Zayni Barakat is set in sixteenth-century Egypt, a seemingly anachronistic stage for exploring the sociopolitical dramas of the twentieth century. The plot covers approximately one year, beginning with the appointment of the eponymous Zayni Barakat as governor of Cairo to the immediate aftermath of the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517. Told from the perspective of various narrators, the story follows the meteoric rise of Barakat, a man without a past. From his position of influence, the book traces Barakat’s growing popularity among the long-suffering population, as well as his eventual betrayal of that support. A striking feature of the novel is its plot, which defies and even frustrates the expected trajectory for such books. Typically, in historical novels, individual actions combine with the fate of various protagonists to move society as a whole forward. Zayni Barakat is, however, an account of how the actions of individuals cancel each other out to produce a state of stagnation that crushes the ambitions of those striving for social progress. The accounts of multiple, unreliable narrators overlap and contradict each other, so that we do not know exactly what happened, but we know enough to gather it was not pretty. As projected back into the sixteenth century, the failure of postcolonialism is represented through the failure of both the novel’s potential heroes—Zayni Barakat and the young Said al-Juhayni, al-Ghitany’s alter ego—to realize their heroic roles. At the beginning of the novel, Zayni Barakat has all the trappings of a heroic statesman. He appears as a spark of hope in a corrupt system, initially refusing his appointment as governor and thereby demonstrating his lack of interest in political power. But Barakat dashes all hopes for his exceptionalism in a haunting scene in which he addresses the population from the pulpit of the venerable al-Azhar mosque—an obvious reference to Nasser’s speech in the same venue during the 1956 Suez crisis. muftah.org/sisi-nasser-the-great-egyptian-novel/
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 09:52:01 +0000
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