| TAXI by Khaled Al Khamassi |
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| Contemporary Books | ||||||||||
| Written by Akin Ajayi, A Nigerian in Israel | ||||||||||
| Saturday, 08 November 2008 00:00 | ||||||||||
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Cairo is an enigmatic city, the kind of place that everyone knows something about, but not very much in fact. It is not so much that it is a city shrouded in mystery; it’s more the fact that the little we know is taken to be representative of the whole, which of course is not the case. They do say they best way to learn about a city is to chat with its taxi drivers. Their opinions may be earthy, critical, unsympathetic, but as close to the pulse of the place as one is likely to get. It is this premise that informs Taxi, the recent English language translation of Khaled Al Khamissi’s Egyptian bestseller. Comprising 58 fictional dialogues between taxi drivers and the novel’s unnamed narrator, what the eponymous novel attempts to do is to unveil the hidden life of the metropolis, quotidian in the actual sense of the word – everday, commonplace, but so much so that we habitually overlook it. Politics, Religion, Sex, the Israelis: No subject is off limits within the cloistered security of the vehicle. Al Khamissi’s strongest suit is the capacity to present a bare, unadorned truth, without editorial or didacticism. One driver falls asleep at the wheel, stretched to exhaustion point as he struggles to meet the instalment payments on his car; another laments for Iraq and for Saddam because the otherwise unlamented dictator championed the cause of itinerant Egyptians in his country; a third drives his taxi in the afternoons whilst studying for a post-graduate degree because ‘it’s impossible for anyone in Egypt to make do with his salary…either we steal or take bribes or work all day’. The book is laced with wry observational commentary, all the more engaging because the narrator does not take himself too seriously, and neither do most of his interlocutors. One insists on telling him how he fell in love with a prostitute. When he tells her he wants to marry him, she tells him he’s an idiot. Now he sees her image in every woman: ‘God spare you that curse, because it is the worst thing in the world.’One possible reason why so much material seems to be available to the writer: According to his narrator, Cairo is awash with taxis, the result of a misbegotten attempt by the government to improve the transport situation in the country. Instead, they create a new cadre of underemployed, with heavy debts to service and not enough work to go around. No surprise that the organs of state suffer under the scrutiny of the drivers, who see the city and live the city, and unfortunately for them, seem to suffer the city much more than most. Khamissi employs a sharp, immediate tone to the narratives. It’s always impossible to say, of course, unless one is schooled in the original tongue, but one suspects that something may be lost in the translation (carried out by Jonathan Wright, a journalist with Reuters Cairo desk). Long exchanges hint at lyrical flourishes, but somehow these do not always seem to come through. Nonetheless, Khamassi’s humour, and his acute eye for narrative detail, does come through, giving the novel a powerful observational significance. One example that says much more about Egypt’s history, and future, than any number of dry historical texts: ‘Anyone who did not go to prison in the time of Abdel Nasser, will never go to prison. Anyone who did not get rich in the time of Sadat will never get rich. Anyone who hasn’t begged in the time of Mubarak will never beg,’ the narrator is told by his sister, after a particularly ruminative journey. ‘Then count me a beggar and bring me anything to eat. I’m dying of hunger,’ he replies. Indeed. Share this article on your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
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