Whether or not they resembled each other wasn’t the question, even if they were of the same generation, sharing Upper Egyptian origins, and both embodying the idea of ‘father’. The first was a generic father, held in common by all, while the second was the individual, actual father — with a hop, skip, and a jump I could be in his bedroom, open up his wardrobe, and run my hands over the neatly folded shirts in one of its drawers.
I was nine years old when a classmate of mine — having suddenly found it necessary to express her nationalist zeal — said, ‘Your mother’s French. The French attacked Egypt as part of the Tripartite Aggression. From now on we’re not friends.’ Although she had caught me off-guard, without a moment’s thought I heard myself say to her, ‘I’m the one who doesn’t want to be friends with you. You have bad breath, and it’s not as if you were poor and couldn’t afford toothpaste — you go to an expensive French school. And by the way, our bawaab’s wife, who comes sometimes to clean our house, doesn’t use toothpaste, but she rinses her mouth regularly and her breath smells lovely. Her clothes are clean as well. You’re horrid — I don’t want to talk to you.’
Quick though I was with an answer, her words took me aback. (The comment ‘it’s not as if you were poor’, and the allusion to a preference for the wife of our bawaab, were like a goal scored in her net, proving that I had learned the lesson my mother taught me. She was careful of my upbringing in matters like these, admonishing me, ‘A certain little girl — the bawaab’s daughter, let’s say — is the same age as you, and by chance — purely by chance — you’re privileged to wear the dress you wear, while it’s not given to her to wear one like it. It may be that she’s better than you. We’ll have to wait and see what you do with what you have, and what she may do in spite of the hardship she faces. And that boy’ — she was referring to a child my age, clothed in rags, who stood at the traffic light selling packets of tissues — ‘is an innocent victim. You get more, he gets less.’ She had an endless supply of these sermons, adducing as evidence my clothes, food, and — the thing she harped on most insistently and distressingly — chocolate. I would grow fidgety with all her instruction, or I might become anxious in the expectation that she would forbid me to buy chocolate. My mother was like a machine, incessantly, tirelessly producing her educational directives, and at that age I could not know anything of the ideological basis for such directives.)
But what the girl had said unsettled me. At lunch I asked, ‘Mama, why did France attack Egypt in 1956?’
‘Because France is an imperialist state, and it had begun to lose the countries it occupied, so it became more aggressive. It had been defeated in Indochina and…’
‘What’s Indochina?’
‘A country called Vietnam, in Asia — I’ll show it to you on the map.’
She was about to get up to go fetch the book, but I persuaded her to put off fussing with the atlas (another of the pedagogical tools to which she frequently had recourse).
‘No, carry on.’
‘Well, France was confronting a revolution in Algeria, and Nasser was supporting this revolution, and moreover he had nationalised the canal. He was a threat to France’s interests, and they wanted to get rid of him.’
‘Were you on the side of the French when they attacked Egypt?’
She laughed. ‘How could I have been on their side?’
‘But you’re French!’
‘Are you in favour of your father’s detention?’
‘Of course not.’
‘So you don’t agree with everything your country’s government does!’
I understood, and I laughed. Then I told her about the horrid girl. She said, ‘There’s no need to cut her off. You could have explained things to her.’
‘I want nothing to do with her,’ I announced firmly. ‘She has bad breath, and besides, I don’t care to keep company with fools — if people saw me with her they might think I’m as stupid as she is. That would be bad for my reputation!’
I particularly emphasised the part about my reputation, and my mother laughed, just as I had intended her to do. And when she laughed, so did I.
My mother did get up to fetch the atlas, and began to instruct me purposefully on the map of Asia and the location of Indochina, reinforcing geography with history. She told me in which years France entered and departed from Indochina, and how… and now it was America’s turn… and all the while I nodded my head, saying, ‘Yes, it’s very clear,’ although in fact nothing was clear, for the simple reason that my head was full of a new question: My mother had said, ‘Nasser constituted a threat to the French, and therefore they attacked him.’ This bit of information assumed a powerful significance in the debate that preoccupied me, as to which man was right — the president who had arrested and detained my father, or my father, whose opinions had led to his incarceration and his being exiled from his family for all these years.
Chapter three
Translation problems I
Joking with my friends, I said, ‘I was a translation “gofer” — I learned the craft by the time I could walk!’
I left it at that, for to go into detail would have required that I tell them the story of my life. They knew my mother was French, and that I was born and raised in a bilingual household, but none of them knew that, from as far back as I can remember, I assumed the role of interpreter. ‘What are they saying?’ my mother would ask suddenly. ‘What does the man mean?’ ‘What is the lady trying to say?’ So I would translate. ‘What’s so funny about that?’ she might demand. And I would explain.
Or someone would ask me, ‘What’s your mother saying? What does she want?’ And I would translate. My paternal aunt might come to visit us, and I would be the linguistic intermediary between her and my mother. But I faced the most difficult trials in the many encounters between my mother and my paternal grandmother. My grandmother never left her village until she was past the age of seventy, and she spoke in a rural idiom that was difficult to understand — in retrospect I think it was eloquent — studded with proverbs, parables, and quotations from the Qur’an. In my childhood, translating what she said was a real challenge, like decoding a cipher. I had to think about it first, then pass along the easier bits, pouncing on the parts I could manage and summarising the rest in order to fill in the blanks. I settled for the gist, or I improvised something that would fit well enough into the general context. But sometimes she defied such devices. My grandmother might produce one little phrase that I could not understand, even though the words themselves were clear enough. For example, ‘When we visited you after they took away your father, a twelvemonth ago, in Toba…’ and I would stop short, perplexed, my mind casting about in a vain attempt to solve the riddle. I knew that ‘a twelvemonth ago’, in my grandmother’s parlance, simply meant ‘last year’, but what on earth was ‘toba’, and what could ‘in toba’ signify? Was it the name of a place where they’d taken my father? Did they make him sit on some kind of brick? But she had said ‘in’ and not ‘on’! I decided it was too much trouble to ask the meaning of ‘toba’, since even a witless three-year-old knew that ‘toba’ meant ‘brick’; nor did I see fit to translate the sentence verbatim for my mother, lest she tell me I was stupid or that my grandmother had gone senile. At the time I knew nothing of the rural custom of using the Coptic names for the months. So I kept quiet. Then, when my mother wanted to know why I didn’t translate my grandmother’s words, imagination came to my rescue. ‘She said that your frock is very pretty. Also, she noticed that your new eyeglasses suit you better than the old ones.’