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language: Arabic (English tr. Elisabeth Jaquette)
country: Egypt
year: 2013
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 19.8.24-23.8.24
Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette) is a deeply unsettling dystopia set in a future implicitly-Egypt, though the country is never named. nearly all government functions have been absorbed by an organization known as “the Gate”, which in the aftermath of what appears to have been a popular uprising — though it is difficult to be sure, as the Gate either directly or indirectly controls all news organizations, and reports on the “Disgraceful Events” become more and more confusing and contradictory over time — has shut its doors, leading to the growth of the titular queue, a seemingly endless line of petitioners coming to request anything from a “Certificate of True Citizenship” to permission to have a surgeon remove a bullet from their body.
the latter case is Yehya, a man who — depending whether you believe his account of events or the Gate’s surveillance records — either was present for the Disgraceful Events out of curiosity and was shot by someone or was an active participant in the Events and also could not possibly have been shot, because, of course, no bullets were fired by anyone.
the novel interweaves Yehya’s quest not — precisely — for justice but rather to have the bullet removed so that he won’t die with the stories of his friends and colleagues (Amani, his some-time girlfriend, who is psychologically tortured; Nagy, a ne’er-do-well former philosophy lecturer who keeps Yehya company in the queue; and Ehab, a radical journalist) and the stories of others waiting in the queue. there’s Um Mabrouk, who establishes a makeshift tea shop to raise money for her daughter’s surgery; Ines, an Arabic teacher who finds herself on the receiving end of severe disapproval when she criticizes a government soldier; Shalaby, a man from a rural community trying to secure a land title for his family; and more. each section begins with an excerpt from what begins as Yehya’s medical file and morphs into a surveillance report, read by Tarek, the surgeon who initially treated Yehya when he was first brought to the hospital.
as the novel progresses, the Gate’s decrees and announcements become increasingly contradictory and increasingly arcane, seemingly targeting Yehya specifically — several successive amendments to a regulation on the handling of bullets by surgeons, for example. much of the novel is about bureaucratic power and the control of institutions: the closure of hospitals (except for the Gate-sanctioned “Zephyr Hospital”), the censorship of journalists, collaboration from telecommunications companies, and especially religion as a tool of social control. this last centers on a contest of wills between “the man in the galabeya”, who holds prayer meetings and religious instruction sessions, and “the woman with short hair”, who voted for the opposition in the last election and refuses to comply with the man’s censures and threats — or the decrees issued by the “High Sheikh” that criticize the “sin” of boycotting Violet Telecom, or any other business owned by a believer:
This sin can be absolved by fasting, or by making seven consecutive phone calls, each one not separated by more than a month.
it’s a dark novel, but not a hopeless one — the Gate is dystopian, certainly, but the novel also explores the kinds of social relations and, perhaps, solidarity, alongside the obvious tensions, that emerge among the people in the queue. it’s explicitly set after a previous revolution, out of which the Gate emerged; I imagine it reflects Abdel Aziz’s disillusionment with the aftermath of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. at the same time, though, it seems to me that it is also very much a novel about the prelude to revolution, its false starts, the rising tensions and contradictions which will eventually become insurmountable. in that respect, in spite of everything, I found it almost (but not exactly) hopeful.
moods: dark, mysterious, tense