Bewildered, we laugh with Radwa, looking back from the safety of the retrospect, as she tries to negotiate the harrowing, Kafkaesque procedures to issue a passport for her Palestinian son born in Egypt to an Egyptian mother and Palestinian father. We laugh some more at the strange permutations of Mourid's name on ever-changing identification papers. From 1977, when Mourid is expelled from Egypt for protesting against the Camp David Accords, till 1995, Tamim's formative years, we follow the diasporic path of the Ashour-Barghouti family, shuttle back and forth from Budapest to Cairo, wait at airports and worry each time whether Mourid, sometimes in the company of such eminent, politicised Arab men of letters as Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef and Palestinian writer Ibrahim Nasrallah, will be allowed to pass through passport control. The Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps are razed to the ground, their residents brutally massacred while we, unawares, are packing our suitcases, munching on a bar of chocolate in the airport lounge, unpacking, and getting our grocery shopping done. The thought nearly drives her to insanity.
Sleep becomes an unpardonable sin, and lack of knowledge, instead of absolving, confirms the guilt.
Unfortunately the quotes from newspapers and Ashour's political gloss which then follow, instead of successfully sharpening, blunt the edge of what had preceded. Forgetfulness and laughter are tactically necessary if an individual memory is to be preserved and if a people and their tale are to survive. Egyptian activist and writer Latifa El-Zayyat, Ashour's mentor, can worry about where the heck her smart dress could have gone. The sometimes effective, sometimes not, juxtaposition of personal with collective history, detailed description of childhood haunts with historical documents and newspaper clippings, literary theory with narrative, makes for an interesting, illuminating and sometimes powerful read. Tone in Atyaf ranges from the intimate to the analytical and, at times, the didactic.