Stories Scanned Through the Metal Detector: In Defense of Troublesome Fiction

…O Cairo, my beloved Cairo, we must talk of you. It was toward the end of 2024, that amorphous year, those tempestuous days. Exiting my Shubran apartment by the Corniche promenade, where to one’s right bobbed up and down the fishing boats of the Nile and to one’s left buzzed to life the Khalafawy Metro Station, I sought to meet a good friend of mine (for the respect of anonymity, we’ll baptize them here as The Writer). The purpose and arrangement of our meeting was a simple one: to haggle for books at the Azbakeya Gardens book market before I boarded my flight to the States a few days later. America, the fated place of my birth, had been—and I am certain will forever be—acting upon an imperial and ballistic heart (the hopeless executioner that it always is), and in preparation to return to such a place, I yearned for the warm company of literature written by an Egyptian hand. Anything would suffice the hunger of my appetite. Anything, and everything. I headed left from my apartment complex and rode the Metro for a few stops. I departed at Attaba station, and not long after, I found The Writer waiting for me at a humble café. We greeted each other with the customary three kisses to the cheek and ordered our respective drinks (I requested mango nectar, and they rotated options before deciding on a cup of nana). Without any delay, we discussed our lives in great detail, our novels in progress, and the Arab condition in the world. We talked about the liberation of the Palestinian and Sudanese people, the music of Umm Kulthum versus the music of Fairuz (how to compare Night from Day!), the Persian language, and the great cities and ballad-mongers of Rome, Ciudad de México, Beirut, Alexandria, Khartoum, and Rabat. I had watched Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat at Zawya Cinema and dreamed for an age of coup d’etats, and they had mentioned watching David Lynch’s Twin Peaks in anticipation to their upcoming journey to Seattle. Topics and thoughts shuffled around us like a used deck of cards, with each card wanting to be played as if newly manufactured and unseen.

Eventually, once our drinks were served and chugged down, we talked about the role of “The Story” as a revolution. While many of us interpret the act and role of storytelling in nebulous ways, I announced that I see it as construction, with the author serving every role—bricklayer, welder, lineman, carpenter, designer, architect, gardener—because this positioning asks the questions of what will be my foundation, and what will it be built upon? The Writer nodded kindly before mentioning that they also saw it as a need for vigorous assertion, for that foundation sometimes isn’t enough for those existing on the West’s eternal periphery (a place of banishment which always existed in my mind’s eye as a dark gorge deep in the belly of the Earth). “You’re an editor now, correct?” they asked me. “I am, yes,” I responded. “Then you must respond to the stories of the world beyond the West,” they said. “Or else the West will have succeeded in claiming you among their perfect idiots and cowards.” We rose from our seats, tipped our waiter generously, and headed over to Azbakeya Garden, where piles of literature stood tall like beautiful statues, and the promise of greenery was absent in lieu of shops and vehicles and heaps of refuse. A false garden among ruinous buildings coated with the fragility of dust and age. It was here that I found what I sought, negotiating with a pool of booksellers and collecting several books of Arabic that were both familiar and unfamiliar to me. The Writer, through their guidance, became a light. An illumination of exposure and urgency and knowledge. Take that one. Drop that. This is quite good. You’ll need this. Don’t worry, I’ll get you a discount for that. After gathering a haul of six books, we headed back to the Metro station before it closed at midnight. It was here that a moment lives and relives within my memory.

A handsome officer with a well-kempt mustache, seeing a clear plastic bag full of books, demanded that they must go through the metal detector. “Habibi, come over here and place them on the conveyor belt.” The bag (its humble contents containing Naguib Mahfouz’s الحرافيش and زقاق المدق, an essay collection from Taha Hussein, Radwa Ashour’s الطنطورية, Youssef Ziedan’s عزازيل, and Khairy Shalaby’s زهرة الخشخاش) is placed on the belt, slowly making its way with a tortoise’s tempo through that terrible, terrible machine. They must be scanned. They must be legal. They must be in line with the General Department of Internal Security’s protocol. They must be [—]... Or else [—]… A metal detector, as we all know, is a security device that probes clothing and flesh for dangerous disturbances. What, then, was the issue? Was I, caught in the act of holding these books, a possible threat? (Had I become a threatening being, an enemy of sorts?) Would the stories within these books possess enough physical substance to trigger a beep… beep… beep… from the detector? Had the sentences contained within those pages become real enough to produce objects of metal, wires, fear? A naked fear, as silly as it may appear, drew its invisible claws within me. The bag was placed and slipped through without a violation or beep, and I went on ahead into the Metro station. The Writer and I had laughed at this brief episode profusely, and they shouted: “Congratulations, you passed the censors!” Or perhaps they had said: “Wasn’t that a metaphor for the shit we writers endure in the modern day!” Or rather: “What a tragedy! I guess what we feed our minds isn’t problematic enough!” Memory, in its assumptive looping, will become a footprint of itself in every recounting. Yet I think of the variations of what The Writer had told me that day (had they told me, or did I tell myself?), and how I think of it as I now find myself in the position of guest editor. Yes, my duty is to read submissions. To scan, if you will, stories and the materials stored within them.

I admit that I fear, above all, a transmutation. That by the West’s subconscious and conscious making, I might find the bones of my four limbs twisting horridly into a conveyor belt, my heart morphing into a scanner, my brain now a monitor. Reader, I fear the mediocrity and safety of industry. The publishing industry itself has become just that: a terrible, terrible metal detector humming against the universality of stories, seeing only the safety of the domestic and the common and the traditional. In this way, those who are on the other end of publishing (in my particular case, an Egyptian donning the uniform of Editor) are at risk of mutating into something cold, programmed, and antithetical to art. As security agents undergo intense training of the physical and national kind, those in the arts undergo the training of sight itself. Yes, vision too can be a most ugly metal detector, for what current powers those eyes? (The books we read? The MFAs we attended? The company we keep?) An editor’s trained eyes may only seek mass appeal and the appeal of the assumedly popular. They may be filled with a life’s accumulated heap of colonial ignorance. The very eyes themselves, through the wire-like connection of optic nerves, may be plugged into a lost mind. In resistance to this, I sought stories that can stir the spirits in all manners of ways, that possessed a global reach, and that approached the story for what it really is: a political being. Something with a bit of metal. Stories that, had they been with me and The Writer on that ordinary autumn day, would’ve led to the desired beeping we had pined for. “Guess the State is troubled by the making of these tales,” I imagine The Writer saying with a proud, grand smile. I would’ve smiled too, accepting the fate reserved for those who disturb the false order. This is my wish and my endless desire for all these stories. Each alive with a burning so strong that they may very well obliterate the damned contraption hidden within us all.