That Smell and Notes From Prison

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Sonallah Ibrahim’s first book, That Smell, was published in Cairo in 1966. The print run was quickly confiscated, though not before a few copies were passed on to local critics, who were almost as unwelcoming as the censors. Yahya Haqqi, one of the grand old men of Egyptian letters and one of Ibrahim’s early mentors, wrote that he was “nauseated” by the novel, lamenting “its lack of sensibility, its lowness, its vulgarity.” Illegal and abbreviated editions subsequently appeared in Egypt and abroad, but it was only in 1986 that a complete edition was published in Cairo. By that time, Ibrahim had become an established novelist and That Smell was recognized, especially by young writers, as a watershed in Arabic literature — a work of sly sophistication and prescient critique, a fiction to frighten the status quo.

It is not obvious, especially to foreign readers at a distance of almost fifty years, why this short work provoked such a violent response. The reaction of the authorities, which Ibrahim recounts with exasperated amusement in his introduction to the 1986 edition (translated here as an afterword), focused on the novel’s representation of sexual matters. But these scenes, which are brief and rather chaste, do not explain such hostility. In fact, there is little in the story that strikes one as explicitly subversive. It begins with an unnamed narrator being released from prison, followed by scenes of his visits to family and friends while re-familiarizing himself with Cairo, his native city. At night he signs a register of house arrest brought to his door by a policeman. The human setting, as with much of Ibrahim’s fiction, is lower-middle-class: government clerks, newspapermen, low-ranking army officers.

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