Using Life - Instructions For Play - The New Inquiry

20/11/2018 Using Life: Instructions for Play – The New Inquiry
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Using Life: Instructions for Play

By BEN KOERBER MAY 16, 2016
Today marks a “Day of Blogging” for Egyptian novelist Ahmed Naji, who is serving two
years in prison: guilty of having written the playful, language-rich, genre-crossing novel
Using Life, he will be given the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award, today, in absentia,
in New York City. When Naji was charged with “violating public morals” for an excerpt of
his novel published in a journal, he initially won his case, but lost an appeal and has been
in jail since February 20.
https://thenewinquiry.com/using-life-instructions-for-play/ 1/12
Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi seems to see playfulness as a growing challenge.

Three years for a cartoon portraying the president in Mickey Mouse ears, the Fan al-
Midan (Art is a Public Square) festival has been e ectively shut down, the cartoonist Islam
Gawish was jailed in February, and just last week, prosecutors extended the detention of
the “Street Children” comedy troupe.
The criminal excerpt can be read online in English translation by Ben Koerber.
Below, Ben Koerber re ects on the play in using life.
…The mother that reads a story to her child: this is resistance. Building a small
house: this is resistance. Singing at night is resistance. Having sex is resistance.
Resistance is not just bearing arms; it is also the ability to adhere to the virtue
of play, and to pursue–promiscuously, and with an eye to passion and
pleasure–methods for using life…
I recall Bisu saying something to this e ect some ten years ago.
July, 2006: Lebanon had been invaded again by the Israeli army a er clashes with
militants from Hizballah. A debate was raging in the Egyptian blogosphere on
strategies for solidarity with the ordinary Lebanese citizens caught in the
cross re. “Resistance” was the rare ed term that Hizballah used to refer to the
bullets and rockets it red randomly southward. Bisu, blogging from somewhere
in or around Cairo, had a di erent understanding of the word.
Like most people, I knew Bisu before I knew Ahmed Naje. The former was for a
time the trickster-protagonist of the blog “Wassa’ Khayalak” (“Widen your
Imagination”), and was known for his devastating parodies of state-sponsored
intellectuals, producers and consumers of kitsch, religious hypocrites, as well as
other bloggers who took themselves too seriously. (The name “Bisu” is explained
as a pseudo-diminutive form of Iblis or “Satan”; before knowing any better, I
sometimes imagined him as sprightly little smug-faced sanfur – Arabic for

“smurf” and an occasional topic of Bisu’s posts). That was all back during the
heady days of what Ahmed Naje, in his history of the Egyptian blogosphere,
refers to as the “Diluvian Age”: a period of glorious cyber cacophony that lasted,
roughly speaking, from the suppression of anti-Mubarak protests in 2005 to the
draining of writers away from blogs to Facebook and Twitter a few years later.
Sometime in late 2009, Bisu transformed, or molted, or something, into
someone called “Ahmed Naje,” which also happened to be the name of a
journalist, editor, and novelist in real life. There was no great “coming out” ritual
here, only a courteous nod of admission to what many readers had already begun
to suspect.
Fortunately, little else changed, and the blog stayed true to its slogan, “Live like
you’re playing.” Bisu’s ludic imperative about the virtues of play were with me
when I began to translate Ahmed Naje and Ayman Zorkany’s novel, Using Life, in
late 2015. Something I had read in graduate school by Roland Barthes about
interpretation as “play” seemed to recommend itself in my e orts at self-
justi cation, but I was happy that Bisu’s sporadic use of the term was possessed of
a more immediate vitality, and beckoned with the warmer and more inviting
ontology of the nonce-concept. Barring some orange-haired apocalypse in
November, my translation of Using Life is on schedule to be released by the
University of Texas Press early next year. But though it may serve as the original
work’s primary representative in the English-speaking world, I would urge we
consider it as just one “play” on the book written by Ahmed Naje and illustrated
by Ayman Zorkany.
The English-language play on Using Life has been preceded by many others, in

di erent idioms and media.
There are Ayman Zorkany’s illustrations, which both complement and “translate”
the text written by Ahmed Naje. Some of these may also be viewed on the Arabic
book’s Facebook page.
As a book, Using Life follows a number of recent experiments in graphic ction in

Egypt and the wider Arab World, such as Metro (El-Shafee, 2008; trans. Rossetti,
2012) and The Apartment in Bab el-Louk (Maher, Ganzeer, and Nady, 2014); as a
literary-graphic hybrid, it resembles most closely Hilal Chouman’s Limbo Beirut
(beautifully translated by Anna Ziajka Stanton; available from the University of
Texas Press in August).
Looking further back in the Arabic tradition, one may contemplate the uncanny
resemblances between Zorkany’s illustrations and the monstrous hybrids of
Zakaria al-Qazwini’s 13th-century Wonders of Creation manuscripts.
Curiously, while moral panics surrounding comics in the United States have
historically targeted the genre for their graphic content, the illustrations in Using
Life have not featured prominently in the recent legal controversy; perhaps this is
because Zorkany’s images, while seemingly grotesque, are only so to eyes not
accustomed to the realities of urban decay in contemporary Cairo.
There is also “The Last Dance of the Blue Anus-Fly,” a lm by Ayman Zorkany.
Based on an illustrated section of Using Life, the animated lm was recently
screened at the Institut Français d’Egypte and other venues.
There is Using Life merchandise. The book’s publication in Egypt coincided with
an exhibit held at the Medrar artists’ collective in downtown Cairo (Nov. 24 – Dec.
1, 2014), which featured Zorkany’s drawings in a variety of printed formats,
including T-shirts, hoodies, pins, coasters, and co ee mugs. These items were
available for sale until recently at Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery, which has been
subject to raids, closures, and partial demolitions by various state agencies.
There are interpretive dance performances. The cultural center Darb 1718, in
Cairo, hosted one in late 2015, which, though I attended, cannot now nd a trace
of on the interwebs.
There are critical reviews. An important context for playing with Using Life and
understanding the surrounding controversy are several not-yet-translated articles
by Egyptian artists and academics. Some appeared in a recent issue of the Cairo-
based literary review ‘Alam al-Kitab (“Book World,” no. 94/95, Nov.-Dec. 2015);
for example, the intriguing essay by poet Ahmed Nada compares the trial of
Using Life with that of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” a poem which has been translated
into Arabic by Yusuf Rakha (in his recent novel, The Crocodiles, itself translated
from the Arabic by Robin Moger), and before him by the inimitable Iraqi poet
Sargon Boulus.
Lastly, or rather primarily, Using Life (Istikhdam al-Haya in Arabic) is itself a

translation, in textual medium, of the aesthetic and architectural work that has
conspired to design contemporary Cairo.
One of the great ironies of Naje’s imprisonment is

Cartoon by Andeel, the
that such direct and draconian displays of state
publication Mada Masr.
power are largely peripheral to the critical concerns
expressed in his novel. Instead, Using Life directs the
reader’s gaze at the more subtle mechanisms of repression and constraint at work
in contemporary Egypt: the per dy of friends and lovers, the “kitschi cation” of
culture, and, most importantly, conspiracies wrought in the realm of architecture
and urban planning. The book is a play, in the rst place, on the utterly unlivable
state of today’s Cairo – “a miserable, hideous, lthy, rotten, dark, oppressive,
besieged, lifeless, enervating, polluted, overcrowded, impoverished, angry,
smoke- lled, simmering, humid, trashy, shitty, choleric, anemic mess of a city,”
according to the protagonist, Bassam Bahgat.
Let the reader be aware that among the city’s current residents, Bassam’s feeling
is far from unusual. Cairo’s decades-old crises in housing, electricity, waste
management, and tra c (to name a few) have le the city both physically and
psychologically scarred, and have remained unresolved amidst the waves of
revolution and counterrevolution unleashed since January 25, 2011. The
intervention of the security services into urban planning has dis gured the city
even further: un-breachable metal sidewalk fences, forcibly depopulated public
spaces, and huge, concrete block walls constructed in the middle of major streets
are now familiar sights around the capital.
Yet as parts of Cairo have shut down, new aesthetic practices have emerged over
the last decade to open new spaces for expression, as well as to re-purpose old
ones. Gra ti artists have laid claim to the city’s walls and barriers. Comedians
and cartoonists have attracted cult followings through YouTube, and bloggers
have emerged from the obscurity of their bedrooms to pioneer new literary
genres. In fashion, advertising, and graphic design, independent artists have
made spectacular interventions in elds traditionally dominated by foreign
brands.
In Using Life, Zorkany and Naje have managed to synthesize many elements of
this resurgent urban culture into something that, together with its “translations,”
may serve as a guide-book of sorts for playing Cairo. All of these “plays” of/on
Using Life – which, incidentally, were all performed or published before Ahmed
Naje was sentenced to two years in prison – not only constitute forms of
translation more inventive than the linguistic plays of professional interpreters,
but that they also o er models for those contemplating solidarity in a manner
suggested by the playful work itself.
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20/11/2018 Using Life: Instructions for Play – The New Inquiry

THE NEW INQUIRY

ESSAYS & REVIEWS

Using Life: Instructions for Play

Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi seems to see playfulness as a growing challenge.

Below, Ben Koerber re ects on the play in using life.

sometimes imagined him as sprightly little smug-faced sanfur – Arabic for

The English-language play on Using Life has been preceded by many others, in

As a book, Using Life follows a number of recent experiments in graphic ction in

Lastly, or rather primarily, Using Life (Istikhdam al-Haya in Arabic) is itself a

One of the great ironies of Naje’s imprisonment is

SUBSCRIBE $2 PER MONTH

ENTER YOUR EMAIL

The Odor of Revolutionary Leak, Memory First-Person

Ibrahim’s That stylish ironies, we memoir really the themes in

Smell bears little glimpse a country detainee? contemporary

resemblance to seething in novels do more

the one found in poverty and than enforce

Egypt today. Why malfeasance and, political

translate a 1966 like the concrete correctness and

novel of failed buildings his mitigate class

revolution now? narratives are con ict; they

The New Inquiry is a 501(c)3 organization.

Your Email SIGN UP

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