Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

A theatrical ‘storm of defiance’ is brewing in her as she lies sleepless. It may read like the cliché passing repentance of one who lives by the sale of her body. But the salutary mood is followed next night by her order that her door should be kept closed to everyone.

That is the night Pharaoh comes to her. No door may be closed to him. He is described as sensually as Mahfouz does his women characters. The encounter is one of erotic beauty and meaning without necessity of scenes of sexual gyration. It is also the beginning of Pharaoh’s neglect of the affairs of state for the power of a ‘love affair that was costing Egypt a fortune’. The price: Prime Minister Khunumhotep has had to carry out Pharaoh’s decree to sequester temple estates. Pharaoh’s choice is for tragedy, if we accept that the fall of the mighty is tragedy’s definition, as against the clumsy disasters of ordinary, fallible people. Rhadopis, in conflict between passion for a man who is also a king and the other, epiphany of concern for the Egyptian people of whom she is one, uses her acute mind — after all, let’s remind ourselves she was perforce wily in her former precarious life — to devise a means by which Pharaoh may falsely claim that there is a revolt of the Maasaya tribes in the region of the priests’ lands and summon his army there to overcome the real rebellion, that of the priests. The intricate subterfuge involves the ruthless exploitation of an innocent boy — also in love with her — by Rhadopis’s resorting to her old powers of seduction to use him as messenger.

Tragedy is by definition inexorable as defeated Pharaoh speaks after the priesthood has exposed his actions to his people and the mob is about to storm the walls of his palace. ‘Madness will remain as long as there are people alive … I have made for myself a name that no Pharaoh before me ever was called: The Frivolous King.’

An arrow from the mob pierces his breast. ‘Rhadopis,’ he orders his men, ‘Take me to her … I want to expire on Biga.’

We hardly have been aware of the existence of Pharaoh’s unloved wife, the queen; how impressively she emerges now with a quiet command, ‘Carry out my lord’s decision.’

Mahfouz’s nascent brilliance as, above all political, moral, philosophical purpose, a story-teller , is in the emotional pace of events by which this story meets its moving, questioning end, with the irony that Rhadopis’s last demand on a man is to have the adoring boy messenger find a phial of poison with which she will join Pharaoh in death, final consummation of sexual passion. For the last, unrequited lover, asked how he obtained the phial, Mahfouz plumbs the boy’s horror in the answer: ‘I brought it to her myself.’

What was the young writer, Mahfouz, saying about love?

The Nile is the flowing harbinger of Egypt’s destiny in the scope of Mahfouz’s re-imagined pharaonic history, starting with Khufu’s Wisdom , fourth dynasty, continuing with Rhadophis of Nubia , sixth dynasty, and concluding with Thebes At War , seventeenth to eighteenth dynasty.

A ship from the south arrives up the Nile, at Thebes. On board not a courtesan or a princess but the Chamberlain of Apophis, Pharaoh by conquest of both the north and south kingdoms. Again, through the indirection of an individual’s thoughts, anticipation is roused as one reads the musing of this envoy: ‘I wonder, tomorrow will the trumpet sound … will the peace of these tranquil houses be shattered … Ah, how I wish these people knew what a warning this ship brings them and their master.’ He is the emissary of an ancient colonialism. Thebes is virtually a colony of Apophis’s reign. The Southerners are, within the traditional (unchanging) justification of colonisation, different. The classic example for that and all time: darker than self-appointed superior beings — in this era the Hyksos of the north, from Memphis. Compared with these, a member of the Chamberlain’s mission remarks, the Southerners are ‘Like mud next to the glorious rays of the sun’. And the Chamberlain adds ‘… despite their colour and their nakedness … they claim they are descended from the loin of the gods and that their county is the well-spring of the true pharoahs’. I wonder what Naguib Mahfouz, looking back to 1938 when his prescient young self wrote his novel, thinks of how we now know, not through any godly dispensation, but by palaeontological discovery, that black Africa — which the Southerners and the Nubians represent in the story — is the home of the origin of all humankind.

After this foreboding opening, there comes to us as ludicrous the purpose of the mission. It is to demand that the hippopotami in the lake at Thebes be killed, since Pharoah Apophis has a malady his doctors have diagnosed as due to the roaring of the animals penned there! It’s a power pretext, demeaning that of the region: the lake and its hippos are sacred to the Theban people and their god Amun. There is a second demand from Pharoah Apophis. He has dreamt that the god Seth, sacred to his people, is not honoured in the south’s temples. A temple devoted to Seth must be built at Thebes. Third decree: the governor of Thebes, deposed Pharoah Seqenenra, appointed on the divide-and-rule principle of making a people’s leader an appointee of the usurping power, must cease the presumption of wearing the White Crown of Egypt (symbol of Southern sovereignty in Egypt’s double crown). ‘He has no right … there is only one kind who has the right’ — conqueror Apophis.

Seqenenra calls his Crown Prince Kamose and councillors to discuss these demands. His Chamberlain Hur: ‘It is the spirit of a master dictating to his slave … it is simply the ancient conflict between Thebes and Memphis in a new shape. The latter strives to enslave the former, while the former struggles to hold on to its independence by all means.’

Of the three novels, this one has the clearest intention to be related to the present in which it was written — British domination of Egypt which was to continue through the 1939–1945 war until the deposing of King Farouk by Nasser in the 1950s. It also does not shirk the resort to reverse racism which inevitably is used to strengthen anti-colonial resolves. One of Seqenenra’s military commanders: ‘Let us fight till we have liberated the North and driven the last of the white with their long dirty beards from the Land of the Nile.’ The ‘white’ are Asiatic foreigners, the Hyksos, also referred to as ‘Herdsmen’ presumably because of their wealth in cattle, who dominated from Northern Egypt for two hundred years.

Crown Prince Kamose is for war, as are some among the councillors. But the final decision will go to Queen Tetisheri, Seqenenra’s wife, the literary ancestress of Mahfouz’s created line of revered wise matriarchs, alongside his recognition given to the embattled dignity and intelligence of courtesans. Physically, she’s described with characteristics we would know as racist caricature, but that he proposes were a valid standard of African beauty, ‘the projection of the upper teeth that the people of the South found so attractive’. A questioning of the validity of any people’s claim to an immutable aesthetic standard of human form … Scholar of the Books of the Dead and books of Khufu’s teaching, Tetisheri’s was the opinion to which ‘recourse was had in times of difficulty’: ‘the sublime goal’ to which Thebans ‘must dedicate themselves was the liberation of the Nile Valley’. Thebes will go to war.

Crown Prince Kamose is downcast when told by his father that he may not serve in battle, he is to remain in Seqenenra’s place of authority tasked with supplying the army with ‘men and provisions’. In one of the thrilling addresses at once oratorical and movingly personal, Seqenenra prophesies ‘If Seqenenra falls … Kamose will succeed his father, and if Kamose falls, little Ahmose [grandson] will follow him. And if this army of ours is wiped out Egypt is full of men … if the whole South falls into the hands of the Herdsmen, then there is Nubia … I warn you against no enemy but one — despair.’