Why Ulysses? - love breaking from childhood dreams

IN late afternoon I would take refuge on a balcony overlooking a very quiet little street, closed to traffic, forgotten by passers-by. Released from the four walls of the apartment, isolated from the rest of the household, I cut myself off from friends and could see, sitting on the tiles still warm from the sun, a corner of the summer sky taking on its fiery colours.

I had two stacks of magazines bought by my father to keep me company. He had recently given me permission to read them. The magazines in the first pile dealt with theoretical, abstract topics that had little appeal for a ten-year-old. I leafed through them slowly, taking infinite pains to try to penetrate some of their mysteries.

My reward came when I delightedly immersed myself in the issues of the second magazine. They were largely devoted to short stories written by Arab authors or translated from various languages, mainly European. But they also featured a wonderful serial--unabridged (or what I thought at the time to be unabridged) translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

My family had moved to Damietta not long before. I had spent my early childhood in a northern Egyptian village not far from the coast, where the tang of the sea could already be smelled. My father had been appointed headmaster of a school there. We lived in one of the village's few stone houses, whose first floor comprised two apartments. A young couple lived across from ours. The husband worked on a boat that plied between several Mediterranean ports and regularly dropped anchor in the waters of the Nile, on the outskirts of the village. He was away for weeks at a time, leaving his beautiful young bride all alone.

Since she had not yet had any children, she could spend her days more or less as she pleased. She would give my mother a hand, looking after my sisters and especially, I think, myself. She told me tales that I would later find in no book and which held me spellbound for hours on end. She opened up for me the secret doors of ever-changing kingdoms, where even my unbridled imagination was soon out of breath in its vain attempts to keep up with her.

I remember that big room in her apartment one evening when it was pouring with rain, as it sometimes does in the Delta. She had lit a small heater to ward off the chill that from time to time made me shiver. I was sitting facing her, as close as I could, riveted to that face whose beauty turned the heads of all the men in the village. Her eyes seemed lit from within, while her melodious voice carried me beyond the seas, across deserts and valleys, in search of faraway princesses, dashing princes and wicked characters who unrelentingly tried to come between them. The villains would be successful for a while but always failed in the end.

We were separated a short time later. My father obtained his transfer to Damietta, and we left the village forever. I was never to see my beloved enchantress again.

Sitting on the tile floor of my balcony, I would sometimes feel the little shiver of that magical evening run through me again. As I followed Ulysses' wanderings, our neighbour's face would appear to me sometimes in Penelope's enigmatic smile, sometimes in Nausicaa's disquieting glance. For a long while I missed the warm, soft closeness of her body. Then, imperceptibly, she drifted out of my life, to take her place among the princesses of legend, standing behind her shutters, lost in one of the countless palaces into which she had led me and to which I no longer held the keys.

Homer introduced me to more complex, more tormented heroes, whose paths crisscrossed before my eyes at a pace that now depended only on how fast I could read. I had sometimes lapped up dozens of pages before nightfall, when my father's voice yanked me out of my dream world to give me some errand to do, or my mother, worried about my eyesight, made me come reluctantly inside.

I often got lost in the overpopulated plot of the Trojan War, but found a few reliable bearings. There were characters to whom I was clearly drawn, others whom I definitely disliked. I detested Helen, whose culpable frivolity was the cause of the war, and I hated Menelaus even more for taking her back after she had betrayed him so many times. But above all, I was won over by Ulysses.

Why Ulysses? Why not Achilles, for example? The affinity I instantly felt for Ulysses left me baffled. Nothing about him resembled the hero I would have liked to be, or at least thought I would. What perplexed me the most were his confused feelings, his contradictory impulses, making him so unlike the clean-cut heroes of my early childhood. I was all the more perplexed to discover the mysterious sway he held over me, the disconcerting ease with which I was drawn to his side.

Penelope on the other hand fitted easily into my familiar world. She was the legitimate heir to those exemplary queens whom I admired for their tenacious fidelity and incredible resistance to every temptation. Yet it was to her husband that I was irresistibly drawn, that moody, wise, insatiably curious adventurer who, not satisfied with trying to find his way home, was eager on his homeward journey to explore other possible dawns, unknown feelings and new temptations, temptations to which he sometimes succumbed.

Although his myth was far more familiar in my environment than that of Ulysses, it was not until several years later that I came across the Arab hero Qais, who was "mad with love for Laila". According to the legend, Indian in origin as I later learned, the young man and his beloved were brought up together in a nomadic tribe. Qais, who was an outstandingly gifted poet, very soon began singing of Laila's beauty and of the love he felt and would always feel for her. Naturally, as soon as he was old enough he asked for her hand in marriage, but, contrary to all expectations, Laila's father flatly turned him down, on the grounds that the success of the young man's poems had damaged his daughter's reputation. Qais adamantly stood up for his love and the father stubbornly continued turning him down, finally going beyond the point of no return by giving Laila to another.

Qais nearly went out of his mind. He left his tribe and for many years wandered alone in the desert, avoiding human contact, and with only animals for company, until one day he came across his tribe. He asked about Laila and found out that she had indeed been given to another in marriage. Seeking out her husband, he addressed him sharply, prying into his relationship with Laila. The husband's embarrassed answers only made him more desperate. Finally he sought out Laila herself, only to discover that the young woman had not had much trouble coming to terms with her fate. The only thing left for the poet to do was fade out of sight from his kinsfolk, once and for all.

I read and reread many versions of the legend, in prose and in verse, with and without explanatory notes. I never managed to feel sympathetic towards the two protagonists. From the outset, I thought Qais was too weak, too passive, and Laila's character did not ring true. There was nothing glorious about their story. They lacked the courage to take their own lives, as Romeo and Juliet would do a few centuries later, and Qais, though betrayed, did not strangle his Desdemona. Moreover, Laila's love seemed to me suspect from the start. It was not as strong as that of Qais; she did not deserve his love. Theirs was not a shared feeling, but a one-sided passion that became an embarrassment.

I could never fathom the attitude of Laila's father. What had got into the man? Qais was a kinsman, a natural match for his daughter. How had Laila's honour been stained? Poetry was a highly-valued means of expression in Arab tribes. Some women even confided in poets in order to achieve a respectable celebrity status through them. A few of them regretted it when the poets went too far and suggested a too intimate knowledge of their persons. But Qais was safe from such criticism. His poetry spoke only of love, and his love remained desperately chaste to the end.

The story left a bitter taste in my mouth, the feeling of a waste whose senselessness irritated me for a long time. At one point I tried dispelling this unease by attempting to identify myself with the heroes, trying to see them in a historical context, however approximate. I finally gave up, resigned to living with my unease, content to observe the unrivalled popularity Qais continued to enjoy throughout the Arab world and to listen for endlessly repeated echoes of his heart-rending lament in all the Egyptian love songs. I could understand neither how nor why an entire people that so greatly admired the manly qualities of courage, endurance and indifference to suffering could have identified with a hero so lacking in those qualities, and whose life was a tale of woe from beginning to end.

I opted for Ulysses, dissociating myself from the general opinion of my countrymen. Were they not inexplicably repudiating themselves, and some of their most loudly proclaimed values, by applauding a hero like Qais? As a youth I began taking note of these interlocking acts of betrayal, all these rifts that little by little spawned new loyalties. Part of me, however, would always remain an orphan.

As far back as my eyes could see, I could no longer discern my beloved enchantress, but I would keep on scanning the horizon.

MAHMOUD HUSSEIN is the pen name of Bahgat Elnadi and Adel Rifaat, respectively director and editor-in-chief of the UNESCO Courier.

COPYRIGHT 1993 UNESCO
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