was unsettled as I faced serious painting for the first time. I returned to my place in front of the easel. Now I had to complete the picture however I could. Listen, I was worried about my self-image at that early date, scared I wouldn’t be up to the picture of myself I’d formed, or that the story of my birth had formed. Mary Labib was present and helped me.
“Paint,” she whispered. “Don’t be afraid, just paint.”
With Mary’s voice spurring me on, I painted with speed and force. I represented the bottle, the tablecloth, part of the wooden table, and part of the glass of the balcony door.
The painting was wanting in my view, although Hazim praised it above those of my peers. He said it showed a refined sense of light and shadow, but proficiency required long practice and a painstaking study of light and shadow. It was praise, but it underscored my sense of inferiority, and on my way home I started thinking again of the light.
I remember the scene as I walked amid the tumult of Saad al-Din Street that day. I observed the tremor in the light when a boy on a bike rushed past with a tray of bread on his head. I noted the contrast left by the light reflected on walls and the faces of peddlers. I saw the faint shadow on faces and said to myself: Could I paint that? Where would I get the patience to study and understand all these distinctions when I loved fun and girls and running after whatever caught my fancy?
I was despondent that day, even though my painting was the best one. See? I’ve had a complex since day one—the neurotic reveals himself at the outset. Instead of being happy that day because I’d painted in oils for the first time, I was thinking about what I lacked.
The studio at the Palace of Culture became a spot of light. I was in the first year of high school, at the beginning of adolescence, getting to know myself and the world. Every day I’d escape the alley and go to the Palace of Culture, regardless of the schedule Hazim had set for us. He was sympathetic, actually. He sensed my need to paint and never asked me why I came at unscheduled times. He left the oils for me to paint with, and I spent days determinedly painting the same bottle, as if it held something alien I needed to grasp. Under my constant scrutiny, it turned into a feminine body. Strips of light slipped into her and formed various shapes in her interior. Ironically, the painting became worse the more I stared at the bottle, until the day when Hazim said, “Enough, Yusuf. The bottle’s bewitched you; you’ll never paint it well. Paint something else, and go back to it later.”
I was sad he didn’t let me complete the experiment, but he knew better.
There was another minor incident in that period that had an important influence. Let me tell you about it. One day, I was going up to the second floor of the Palace of Culture and I heard the sound of the piano. It was the first time I’d seen Amm Farid get up from the chessboard and sit on the oval black seat and start to play. Hazim was standing at the studio door, and women employees at the palace were sitting scattered around the hall. Silence enveloped the place. I stood at the door, unable to enter. Amm Farid was playing a piece I thought I’d heard before, maybe in the score of an old film. I don’t know, but the feeling captivated me from the first instant. The melodies flowed and formed a feeling like light. I started listening to the music, giving full rein to my imagination. The slow melodies created a space in which dried leaves fell from a tree like the lone tree below the balcony, and the leaves drifted in the never-ending space between the tree limbs and the ground, fluttering, swaying, and shifting.
In 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
