Copyright 1991 Guardian Newspapers Limited The Guardian

January 31, 1991

LENGTH: 864 words

HEADLINE: Books: Sexual solution to a failed revolution - Paperbacks

BYLINE: By AFSHIN RATTANSI

BODY:

The Beggar, by Naguib Mahfouz (Doubleday, Pounds 5.99) Foreign Studies, by Shusaku Endo (Sceptre, Pounds 4.99) The Story Of Jazz, by Marshall W. Stearns (OUP, Pounds 6.99) Myth, Literature And The African World by Wole Soyinka (Canto, Pounds 4.95)

IF ONLY we could 'solve our most serious problems with a pill after eating,' says the physician to Omar, the Loman figure in The Beggar. In this recently translated novella Mahfouz floodlights the shadowy crises, political and psychological, of urban man. He has a solution, too, more elegant and relevant then in all the advertiser-targeted journalism at your newsagent.

Of course, it's a little different for Omar al-Hamzawi. He doesn't drive a forties Chevy or a nineties vehicle from a United Germany. He lives in Cairo, in the aftermath of the 1952 Revolution. It's also worse for Omar because he was a revolutionary in his youth, glimpsing Utopian dreams that never caught the imaginations of Loman or the twentysomething generation. It is surely worse to have seen and lost than not to have seen at all.

But like them, he suddenly discovers a hole in his life, one that no doctor can patch up. Its causes are many: a stable home life and job, a liberal, secular outlook, a dilution of political passion. The symptoms, chiefly alienation from work, family and friends, are similar to those of you suffering mid-life crises today. Omar leaves his wife and children, temporarily finding a tonic in sexual encounters with the women who dance at Cairo's hotels, for a while setting up home with one of them. His two best friends represent a culmination of the liberal secularism that pervaded Egypt's smoke-filled La Coupoles for a century before. One accommodates change, the other opposes it and both try to find a cure for their old classmate. But Omar comes nearest to finding it, even if it's too late.

Both The Beggar and Shusako Endo's Foreign Studies were first published in 1965. I suppose editors, knee-deep in returns and forthcoming British slush, are playing some kind of ethnocentric joke. Twenty-five year time-lags for the publication in Britain of novels by Endo and Mahfouz?

Three stories form Endo's theme of living abroad. He traces the visits of three Japanese to Europe, a student in France, a Catholic convert in sixteenth-century Rome and a lecturer studying de Sade in polo-necked fifties Paris. The moral of these tales of cross-cultural nightmare is as beautifully offered to the reader as it is untrue. The evidence that cultures may marry successfully is all in The Story Of Jazz, even though the form required a wedding consisting of slavery and genocide.

This 1956 tome comes endorsed by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Stearns, like a chemist after an explosion in the lab, chronicles the progress of the melting pot with a sense of wonder. Turn the colonial heat on, the best was Spanish and Portuguese Catholic, that way you don't have droning Protestant hymns and get some Arab influences too. And hey presto, the tribal reactants from West Africa, through a process of syncretism, produce jazz. He vividly describes the formation of 'blue scales' and ever-more complex rhythms, following innovators and popularisers through blues, swing and bop. If only it had been updated to include Coltrane etc.

Stearns only alludes to the way that saints such as John the Baptist became identified with West African tribal gods like Sango, the Yoruban god of thunder, one of a number of crucial associations without which the history of jazz would have been different. Soyinka's more modern text reveals far more about the cultures still deemed 'primitive' in today's schoolbooks.

Kicking off with three African gods, Ogun, Obatala and Sango he examines the profound transformation within the human psyche caused by the de-terrestrialisation of gods. Unlike Greek and African gods who inhabited the earth, both Buddhism and Judeo-Christianity moved the gods to a place in the sky, thus 'narrowing the cosmic whole', and destroying the cleansing, communal force of 'ritual drama'. Soyinka defines ritual theatre as a 'manageable contraction of the cosmic envelope within which man fearfully exists'. He contrasts the African approach to drama with the European. The difference is to be found, he writes, in the Western 'compartmentalising habit of thought', so that on watching a play we are like steam engines. Picture one, shunting between closely spaced suburban stations, picking up a ballast of allegory, emitting a smokescreen of pastoral elegies. Next stop, it loads with 'naturalist timber', before puffing into a half-way stop to fill up with the synthetic fuel of surrealism. After the driver has glimpsed another holistic world-view through psychedelic smoke, the train is lured by a consignment of absurdist coke after which it leaves the station emitting no smoke, or fire, at all. After a short derailment on constructivist tracks, it's towed back to the beginning by a neo-classical engine.

Soyinka's short book not only reduces the 'occidental creative rhythm' to a series of intellectual spasms but also illuminates a wholly different world-view.