Chapter 9 - Romance and Liminal Space in the Twentieth-Century Cairo Novel

Summary

Because the birth of the Egyptian novel came so late in the Arabic literary tradition (1914) and coincided so closely with the country’s independence from the British, it is no surprise that questions of national identity and authenticity are an overlying preoccupation. What is perhaps surprising is the extent to which these questions are enacted in the arena of courtship and marriage. In the canon—as in the capital—liminal space remains prime real estate in the economy of desire. For those in Cairo who are unwilling or unable to marry at a conventional age, traditional values and familial structures, combined with a culture of surveillance and patriarchy, results in a thorny romantic landscape. All of this is exacerbated by neoliberal policies that stretch the preexistent wealth gap, as well as the increased privatization, militarization and monetization of public space. This chapter will explore possibilities for desire through liminal spaces in a select survey of (mostly) 20^thcentury Cairene novels: Tawfiq Hakim’s 1933The Return of the Soul, Naguib Mahfouz’s 1947Midaq Alley, Latifa al-Zayyat’s 1960The Open Door, Enayat al-Zayyat’s 1963Love and Silence, Gamal al-Ghitani’s 1976The Zaafarani Files, Abdel Hakeem Qassem’s 1987An Attempt to Get Out, and Alaa al-Aswany’s 2002The Yacoubian Building.