Ancient times
It would be impossible not to begin this short presentation of Egyptian literature without recalling that this country was one of the first centers of civilization where writing appeared. Hieroglyphics, which amuse children as much as they intrigue adults, are figurative or abstract drawings found engraved in the cartouches that adorn temples and tombs. The oldest of these date back to over 3,000 BC, and this sacred writing, said to be a gift to man from the god Thoth, has yet to reveal all its secrets. On papyrus, no doubt to save time, scribes preferred to use simplified, stylized characters: hieratic script, then demotic, one of the three languages featured on the famous "Rosetta Stone". In 392, Emperor Theodosius signed a ban on pagan cults, and with this edict began the disappearance of hieroglyphic writing, which would later give way to Egyptian Arabic. It was not until a thousand years later, during the Renaissance, that cardinals in Rome discovered lying obelisks, and scientists decided to decipher these strange characters. What, strictly speaking, remains of these ancient times? Quite a few texts, to the delight of Egyptologists and papyrologists. Autobiographies, such as that of Ouni, on display at the Cairo Museum, whose life - and this is astounding - is recounted to us more than 4,000 years after his death, but, of course, religious texts too. Among the oldest, the Pyramid Texts were discovered at the end of the 19th century by Gaston Maspero on the site of Ounas; they were completed a few decades later by the Sarcophagus Texts collected by Adriaan de Buck. These formulas for accompanying the deceased can be found in papyri placed near mummies, such as the Livre pour sortir au jour, better known as the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Beyond funerary rites, writing also served to freeze tradition. The Teaching of Ptahhotep is one of the oldest surviving books of wisdom. At a very old age, the vizier asked Pharaoh for permission to pass on to his son what he had learned about life. This treatise on the moral rules to be observed by honest men reflects a high humanist conception. From the Middle Kingdom onwards, as papyrus became more widely used, truly literary texts began to appear. The Tales of the Magicians at the Court of Khufu, for example, were intended to entertain the king, with a touch of fantasy added to the familiar themes of love and infidelity. The great myths and fables gave pride of place to poetry, which became very fashionable during the New Kingdom. But from now on, we must leave the dead to their rest and allow ourselves a thousand years of ellipsis.
The advent of Egyptian literature
When Bonaparte embarked on an Egyptian expedition at the very end of the 18th century, he certainly had no idea that he would leave behind him a question that would become a leitmotif among the country's thinkers, an observation that Boutros al-Boustani would put into words a few years later in the form of an anxious and dubious question: "Why are we behind?" Indeed, this confrontation with the West opened the floodgates to a veritable intellectual rethink, the Nahda, reinforced by the independence gained in 1805 and encouraged by the arrival in power of Mehemet Ali (or Mohammed Ali), viceroy, resolutely reformist and considered the founder of modern Egypt. He decided to send emissaries to France, including Tahtâwî, who brought back L'Or de Paris (The Gold of Paris) from his five-year journey, published in French by Sindbad-Actes Sud. This tasty tale is as astonished by local customs, whether feminine or culinary, as it is by the thoughts of the philosophers of the Enlightenment. The author is also interested in the syntax of the Arabic language, which he tends to simplify to make it readable by as many people as possible, foreshadowing the fabulous work he will accomplish on his return home, notably by setting up a language school in 1835 and a translation office in 1841. In the 19th century, Western influence and the intermingling of cultures were also felt in the theater. Yaqub Sannu, born in Cairo in 1839, did not hesitate to claim the inspiration he found in his masters, from Molière to Goldoni, and even to adapt their works into Egyptian. His political commitment and his struggle against English domination, which crystallized during the war of 1882, drove him into exile for some thirty years. In Paris, he launched the first Arab satirical newspaper.
Each country has its own "Prince of Poets", and Egypt's is named after Ahmed Chawqi. After studying law in France and spending time abroad, he became poet laureate of the Kedhive court until 1914, when the British exiled him to Andalusia. Six years later, he returned to his homeland, where his invaluable contribution to Egyptian literature was fully recognized. Nostalgia, as much as praise for his homeland, is at the heart of his work, still highly appreciated today, and he is one of the precursors of the neoclassical movement. At the same time, the novelistic genre was also developing, and Zaynab is often cited as the first modern novel with a social theme. Muhammad Haykâl (1888-1956) completed it in Paris in 1914. The author, who initially published anonymously in Cairo, went on to enjoy a successful career as a journalist, founding the magazine al-Siyasa, and then as a politician, becoming President of the Senate in 1945, after serving as Minister of Education. Zaynab tells the very sad story of a farm worker, and while the tone is rather maudlin, Haykâl nonetheless has the merit of bringing the peasant condition to the fore for the first time. His near-contemporary, Taha Hussein, was born in 1889 into a poor family in Middle Egypt, which did not prevent him from enjoying a brilliant political career, despite suffering from blindness from his earliest youth. Benefiting from a state scholarship, he studied at the Sorbonne and entered literature, like many others, through translation, developing a passion for Sophocles and Racine as well as André Gide. His three-volume fictionalized biography(Le Livre des jours followed by La Traversée intérieure) was universally acclaimed through translations (in French by Gallimard), but it was his critical book, De la poésie pré-islamique, that earned him notoriety, and some hostility, in the Arab world. At the turn of the twentieth century, Tawfiq al-Hakim, the "giant of Arab theater", was born. A talented avant-gardist, more or less understood, he abandoned his legal career to devote himself to writing until his death in 1987. A clear innovator, he is credited with the creation of "mental theater", and although his plays were not necessarily intended to be performed, they are, under symbolic guise, a virulent critique of society. His sources of inspiration are numerous, from the Pharaonic era to mythological references, from vaudeville to the absurd, and his few novels sometimes take on autobiographical overtones, as in his Journal d'un substitut de campagne.
Contemporary literature
The twentieth century was a mixed bag: on the one hand, literature was reaching more and more readers, thanks to growing literacy and authors, some of them journalists, with a strong desire to show reality and combat inequality; on the other hand, it was going through dark periods during which moral censorship was the order of the day. Yet this is the century that saw the birth of Naguib Mahfouz, in 1911, the first Arab writer to win the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. Of his abundant, sometimes uneven work, we should remember his Cairo Trilogy, which recounts half a century of his country's history through the adventures of a bourgeois family in a neighborhood where he himself lived, and Les Fils de la Médina, which was banned on the grounds of blasphemy. While Mahfouz's political stance has long been the subject of controversy, particularly in the case of the short Karnak Café, which can be read as a critical allegory of Nasser's regime, whose coup d'état in 1952 seemed to have met with Mahfouz's approval, one woman, Nawal el Saadawi, born in 1931, has not hesitated to risk prison in order to publicize the terrible condition of women in Egypt. Her partly autobiographical novel, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, became one of the first feminist texts in 1958; it was followed by many others, increasingly committed. Sonallah Ibrahim's Les Années de Zeth (Actes Sud, 1993) is an edifying portrait of a country engulfed by corruption and religion. In 2016, French cartoonist and screenwriter Thomas Azuélos published an adaptation of his quasi-Kafkaesque novel, Le Comité, with Cambourakis.
Alternately war reporter and founder of a literary weekly, Gamal Ghitany (1945-2015) was perhaps less politically assertive and possibly considered rather mystical, yet his work, translated into French mainly by Editions Seuil, abounds in humor and tenderness as he evokes his people through the centuries. The success of Alaa al-Aswany's L'Immeuble Yacoubian, published in 2002 by Actes Sud, is still going strong in bookshops today. The author's ability to combine classical writing with important themes, such as homosexuality and revolution, has made him a man in the public eye.
Finally, it would be impossible to conclude without mentioning those who chose to write in French, or even to settle in Europe. Thus, it was with infinite sadness that Paris witnessed the funeral of Andrée Chédid in 2011, a humanist who won the Goncourt for short stories in 1979 and for poetry in 2002, and it was the French capital that welcomed Robert Solé in 1969, whose career at Le Monde had as much impact as his many publications. Gilbert Sinoué, born in Cairo in 1947, is renowned for his detective and historical novels, to which he decided to devote himself fully after interrupting his career as a lyricist.
