Sonallah Ibrahim (1937-2025): The sixties seer - Culture - Al-Ahram Weekly

Al-Ahram Weekly

2 days ago

Once, an artist from Jerusalem who was staying with me insisted that we go and see him. I called his home number. That may have changed more recently but, till the last time I saw him, Sonallah never owned a mobile phone. His hallowed answering machine came on and once I gave my name, I could hear his own perky, welcoming voice as he picked up… That must've been 2006. Sonallah was already a recipient of the prestigious Al-Owais Award (in 1993), a major literary figure by any count, but he was still—always—eminently approachable. A few months shy of seventy, he was so energetic he came across as much younger.
I remember being lost, driving from Maadi to Sonallah's sixth-floor apartment in Heliopolis. I had been there before, but my state of mind was wrecking navigational havoc. This was a difficult time for me, with anxiety attacks and premonitions of doom marring almost every interaction. I remember Sonallah noticing how jittery I was, advising me against self-medicating. He was a reticent, measured, drily humorous interlocutor, but he managed to be among the warmest, most deeply empathetic people I knew. Above all I remember the awe with which my artist friend regarded the small, spiky figure as he bustled about, serving us hot drinks. What drew Palestinians to his work so much? Even among other paragons of the Generation of the Sixties—the literary movement that followed Naguib Mahfouz and others whose careers had started in the first half of the 20th century, and included many celebrated figures—Palestinians found no one as compelling as Sonallah.
In 2007, the late novelist Gamal Al-Ghitani (1945-2015) told me there were only two original achievements in the Generation of the Sixties: his own return to canonical storytelling; and Sonallah's hyperrealism. Both novelists believed in the Sixties ethos, that mixture of socialism, Arab nationalism, and secularism that emerged out of Gamal Abdel-Nasser's revolutionary dictatorship (1954-1970). Both had been imprisoned for political activities. Sonallah had it harder, though: while a law student at Cairo University, in 1959, the Nasser regime arrested him for belonging to a communist organisation. He was barely 20, and he spent what would've been his university years in prison, five years in total. Still, Sonallah remained loyal, if not to the regime's repressive practices, then to Nasser's vision for national liberation: pan-Arab, anti-colonial, and devoted to the most dispossessed sectors of the population…
Ghitani fought for these values from within the establishment. In 1993, under Nasser's neoliberal heir Hosni Mubarak, he founded the state's most successful cultural publication, Akhbar Al-Adab, a weekly. He not only edited Akhbar Al-Adab but, through this and other roles, gathered enough influence and visibility to function as a kind shadow culture minister. For his part Sonallah never accepted an official—or indeed any—position in his life. He never worked with private-sector publishers, either, preferring the independent Dar Al- Mustaqbal Al-Arabi for the most part. In retrospect I can see he was not just fiercely guarding his independence, since his work often dealt explicitly with political issues, but also living out the Sixties ethos as faithfully as possible.
After his release in 1964, Sonallah was badly off and isolated, unsure how to proceed. As he later avowed, a diary in which he noted down what was happening to him in short, terse, verb-driven sentences helped to keep him sane. He was working on short stories at the time, more involved narratives in the vein of socialist realism. But it was this straightforward record of everyday suffering—freed not just of the strictures of socialist realism, which as a young, committed communist he felt he had to follow, but of any conscious attempt at artifice at all—that eventually commanded his attention. The diary gradually morphed into That Smell, a novella that—along with the Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri's 1972 For Bread Alone—would form the core of my own literary aesthetic and sense of modern Arabic. By general consensus it is a seminal work, evidencing the kind of quiet, spare, first-person lyricism that would not resurface in Sonallah's writing until 2007 (in Stealth).
That Smell exposed the horrors and hypocrisies of a world headed for resounding collapse: within a few years, indeed, the 1967 defeat to Israel would serve as a rude awakening from the Nasserist dream of dignity and development, arguably debilitating the young republic long-term. Completed in 1964, That Smell first appeared in 1966, enthusiastically introduced by the great short story writer Youssef Idris (1927-1991), a household name at the time. Several small editions followed, some appeared cut, others were banned on publication, not because the text contained political polemic but because its minute descriptions of masturbation, for example, were deemed offensive. Here was a narrator for the times, however: a figure who was neither hero nor antihero but simply frugal witness, able to evoke the full gamut of reality by sticking with the most basic, physical information, entertaining no emotional or intellectual flights.
That Smell turned Sonallah into the voice of an era. And, like any writer who produces a truly original first book, he wasn't sure what to do next. In reality he wouldn't write anything like That Smell until Stealth, when he felt compelled to return to his childhood at the age of seventy. If Sonallah marked the end of Nasser's world with a whimper in That Smell, for some three decades after that he delivered a series of bangs: long, complex, inventive satires on specific topics. Sonallah had managed to get a job at the state Middle East News Agency, but by 1968 he was in Beirut dabbling in literary translation and editing. He worked as a journalist in the German Democratic Republic for three years, studying screenwriting at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow as of 1971. There he met the famed Syrian filmmaker Mohamed Malas, appearing in Malas' VGIK graduation project.
Sonallah never worked in film, however, and by 1975—back in Cairo—he had freed himself of all journalistic commitments too. Soon his hyperrealist bangs, novels that incorporated found material—newspaper archives, personal letters, official documents—and experimented with structure, had already begun to appear: August Star (about the building of the High Dam, which he also documented in the 1967 book High Dam Human) in 1974, The Committee (a Kafkaesque critique of the ideological about-face Nasser's successor Anwar Al-Sadat undertook, allying himself with Washington and introducing 'open-door' economics) in 1981, and Beirut Beirut (an early reckoning with the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990 and its regional implications, drawing on Sonallah's earlier stay in the country) in 1984.
Through this, even when there was no direct mention of Palestine, Sonallah dramatised and satirised the reality of Arab helplessness: not only occupation and ethnic cleansing without but Civil War, repression, and corruption within. In 2004, he became a founding member of Kefaya, the Egyptian movement for Change, which brought dissidents together in protest of the Mubarak regime. The previous year, he had spectacularly turned down the 2003 Award of the Conference on the Novel, an initiative of the government's Higher Council of Culture. For weeks after being notified he had won the EGP 100,000 honour, he kept his decision to decline it secret so that he could appear at the awards ceremony and read out a deeply moving speech turning down 'the honour of a government that does not have the credibility to bestow it.'
In his statement, often remembered during the 2011 January Revolution, Sonallah made some points that have sounded truly prophetic since October 2023. 'At this moment, while we gather here, the Israeli forces are invading what remains of Palestinian territory, killing pregnant women and children and making thousands homeless, carrying out with obvious systematic precision the genocide of the Palestinian people and their displacement out of their land. Yet Arab capitals receive Israeli leaders with open arms, and only steps away from here,' that is, the Opera House grounds, where the ceremony was taking place, 'the Israeli ambassador resides, secure. And only steps away in another direction, the American ambassador occupies an entire neighbourhood while his troops spread into every corner of a homeland that was once Arab.'
After Beirut Beirut, Sonallah published Zaat (1992) and Sharaf (1997)—about women and LGBTQ people in Egypt, respectively—as well as Warda (2000), a reckoning with the 1963-1976 Marxist revolution of Dhofar, Oman. The year he declined the Novel Award, he published another topical satire, Amri-kan-li (the title is a pun on 'American' and 'I am master of my affairs'). A hyperrealist response to his term as a guest lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley in 1999, its message chimed perfectly with his oppositional gesture at the Higher Council of Culture, reconfirming his commitment to speaking the political truth: a basic Sixties principle by which few had abided. Ten years later, in 2013, Zaat was made into a phenomenally popular TV show that finally turned Sonallah into a kind of household name, giving him some of the social kudos he had willingly forsaken for so long.
In 2015 I ran into Sonallah at Cairo Airport. We were both on our way to the Abu Dhabi Book Fair, and before either of us knew I would end up moderating one of his panels, he greeted me like an old friend. At the event itself—reiterating his 2013 position against the Muslim Brotherhood—Sonallah spoke provocatively against unthinking religiosity, insisting we cannot take the alleged traditions of the Prophet Mohamed at face value, without understanding the political context in which they were cited (or, as he kept saying, made up in return for money). Many in the audience were visibly offended, but his tirade was hilarious. And I was incredibly proud to be sitting next to him.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 21 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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