truth, I wasn’t hearing a piece of music—I was watching a visual experience. That day, for the first time, I understood the concept of creativity.
I was touched by the feelings the music left in my being and told myself I wanted to paint pictures that had the same impact. How could I do that? The question dogged me for a long time without an answer. From that early date, I chose the most difficult point against which to measure myself, without regard for my modest skills. Every painting I do brings to mind my feeling about that piece. I ask myself: Will this painting leave someone with the feeling Amm Farid’s music left in me?
At the end of the summer, Hazim al-Shirbini introduced us to the Ankh Society, a group of his friends who met in Hussein Said’s house on al-Alfi Street. A new door to knowledge and self-understanding opened before me. There I discovered a different kind of light. The group was made up of Hazim, Hussein Said (the owner of the place), Bilal al-Sheikh, and Mahmoud Qandil, a morose young man with a bristly mustache. He was a communist, and once he started talking, he didn’t stop.
The most prominent of them was Bilal al-Sheikh. He’d studied at the College of Fine Arts in Alexandria with Seif Wanli and worked as an art teacher for the education department. He was enthusiastic and thought the arts were the foundation of progress. That was in the summer of 1977, the beginning of the inflation that nipped away at people’s wages, the beginning of the traffic and collapse of services.
In our first gatherings, we read the Manifesto of May 30, which Bilal had written in 1968. That nine years had elapsed since the penning of the manifesto turned it into a sort of gospel for me, a youth of seventeen who loved absolutes. That you could read a paper written nine years ago when you were a boy playing in the street or hanging off the back of the street-washing truck—it was like you were perusing history. The manifesto was poetic and utopian and spoke to a person’s desire for perfection. Maybe it’s because it was unworkable that it was so attractive.
I distanced myself from the alley and lived in that unsullied world in Hussein Said’s room, embracing the manifesto like a new religion. Despite the surging in my body, my fascination with girls, and collecting the contributions for my mother, the Thursday meeting of the Ankh Society became the most important event in my life. The manifesto was a project for living, for a different life than the one I lived in our house, one that called on you to make “your eye a sun, your ear a sun, and your spirit a sun.” The first night after Bilal read out the manifesto for us, I didn’t sleep. My tendency to elevate ordinary events to the exemplary is one neurosis I still haven’t shaken.
Hussein was smitten by broadcasting. The emergence of the cassette player at that time enabled him to turn the manifesto into a radio piece set to Wagner. He had a melodious voice and thought himself a radio announcer who hadn’t yet had his chance. With its high-flown oratory and epic sensibility, the manifesto was like one of those speeches of Abd al-Nasser’s we’d begun to miss.
Years later, I was embarrassed by my callowness and took to mocking the Ankh Society and the customs of those nights, when we’d read poetry, listen to music, and contemplate paintings. But trust me, I mocked them in my impotence and failure. Mockery is the tool of the impotent. I mocked them to tell myself I’d grown up and was past that phase. But really, is that true? Isn’t my whole life a childish frivolity, evidenced by the fact that I’m still attached to painting so late in life despite few successes, a handful of exhibits, and some individual acquisitions? The more I think of it, I find the teachings of the Ankh Society are the only pure things I tried to embody. Maybe that’s the cause of my failure, and also of the modest success of some of my paintings.
There’s another way of looking at it. The members of the Ankh Society looked down on people and were deeply insular. Much later, when I noticed this insularity and condescension in myself, I knew it was largely an attempt to endow the self with some worth. This condescension isn’t only for arrogant artists of my ilk, but for all figures who set themselves above others, from all religions. The wellspring is this: in this country, you have to carry something sacrosanct in your soul to find your missing value, to cultivate your spirit with some worth above and beyond the neglect by society and the authorities. You’ll find this trace of condescension and insularity among members of Islamist groups, monks, and anyone who belongs to the sacred in some way. The only people who escape it are those who instinctively realize that they’re just grains of sand, simple ephemeral creatures who pass over the earth like a cloud’s shadow. That’s a place reached only by the great Sufis and monks and inspired souls. As for all the others, you’ll find them perplexed, like your brother Yusuf Tadrus.
Like I said, I was as passionate about the manifesto as if I’d written it. The lovely poetry pervaded me, urging me to make my eyes a sun and my spirit a sun. Since it coincidentally used the metaphor of the sun, it touched the deepest part of my psyche. I began searching for ways to do it: practicing painting and listening to music, reading and deliberating, resisting the seductions that consume energy and time. See? The way of Sufis and monks. Elevating oneself above human life is complicated and baffling, but exciting for a youth of seventeen about to sit for the matriculation exams. One who wants a bit of an escape from the fully corporeal life in his neighborhood. A confused, frightened person who wants a whiff of the absolute.
When school started, it became hard to go to the Palace of Culture. I started the austere year of the matriculation exam, the first person in Khawaga Tadrus’s family to make it to the exam. Imagine, the fear of death that accompanied my life was cast outward as a great joy when I was studying that year.
“Yusuf’s prepping for the exam,” my mother would say from the threshold at Umm Bisa and Hassanein’s house. An innocent, ironic smile appeared on my father’s face, as if he’d outsmarted the Lord and Yusuf had lived despite the death of his brother and the car accident. When I’d go out on Thursday with my ironed shirt, bell-bottom pants, and platform shoes, my mother’s face would cloud over, as she worried that the Ankh Society nights would take me away from studying. The exam was the door that would lead Yusuf to another station. It would save him from the alley. But she knew that stopping me was impossible.
“Take care of yourself, brother,” she’d say, allaying her fears. She called me “brother,” maybe to revive the secret bond between us on our wanderings in the city to collect the contributions, the feeling underlying the story of my birth. Or maybe to surreptitiously bolster that greatness in my being. Forgive me: I’m trying to understand, but it’s hard. Retrieving life at a remove is a difficult thing.
Despite the strain of that period because of my family’s focus on the exam, the experience of painting the bottle on the tablecloth in the Palace of Culture abided. I’d escape studying by examining what the experience had left in me. I think the idea that light is the origin of things started then and put down roots. Light is the liquid spirit behind things, the intangible phantom essence. At root, anything can hold a slip of light, a secret spirit. Everything can turn into light.
Vague and distant, these thoughts loomed, naïve and unable to take shape in the mind of a seventeen-year-old boy awash in fears and confusion. It was a difficult task. I’d realized that painting meant you could capture the hidden spirit of the bottle, the vase, and the tablecloth, but how do you acquire the eye to perceive the liquid spirit of inanimate things? Fingers capable of conveying that spirit? How could you grasp a liquid thing like light coursing within everything? Difficult.
I started dodging my studies and spent nights practicing to perfect the lines of the bean pot, or a small plate, or the chair my father sat on, behind the door. I struggled hard and long, but the ideal was so high, beyond my capabilities. I was stubborn like my father.
The next day, I’d say I could paint the water jug in Umm Bisa’s window. I could paint my mother’s concentration as she chopped the mulukhiya. It was a senseless struggle, because my natural abilities were ordinary. But what can I say? The idea that I was destined for something big lurked beneath every action, deluding me that I could create this thing, that I could reach the liquid spirit underneath things.
The pace of the work I’d assigned myself picked up. I had to study, and I had to practice painting to get into the College of Fine Arts to study with Seif Wanli. The city attracted me and sparked a