Empty cages

Its construction from short narrative paragraphs carrying the paradoxes of poetry and its fleeting flashes. It is a poetic soul narrative whose awareness of itself blossoms amid the storms that began to strike the Egyptian middle class throughout the last third of the twentieth century. And its author re-raises the question of the civil form in novel writing, and the aesthetic relationship between memory and imagination, and literature and acknowledgment. Features of an entire country and era appear from within the cracks of a layer, and through the existential struggle of the narrator with life: from the cities of the Canal and successive wars, displacement and exile, to the suburbs of East Cairo in their prosperity and decline, to oil migrants and teachers’ loans. A time lived by all Egyptian homes in varying degrees that Fatima Qandil does not narrate, but she lives it with us, blood and flesh, with all the stolen joys, the persistent sorrows, and the fear of tomorrow that does not dissipate.