Mahmud El Sayed The Republic of Memory
W
elcome aboard the Safina, a colossal city ship carving its way through
space to the planet Hurriya, a new start for humanity after Earth was devastated by nuclear war and technological disaster. This ship is the setting of Mahmud El Sayed’s masterfully crafted debut The Republic of Memory, the first in a duology. Two hundred years remain until
the Safina will reach Hurriya; the thousands of people on the ship, known as the crew, work so that their descendants will be able to live on the planet alongside the “ancestors”, people from Earth kept in cryostasis because they were deemed important or necessary to restart civilisation on a new world. But all is not well on the Safina,
despite what Adminstration, the controlling bureaucratic class, would have you believe. Blackouts are becoming more frequent and revolution is brewing. Competing factions – the Haraka, the Kommunists and Zendistas to name a few – want change. What this looks like depends on who you ask, but all more or less agree – Admin has to go. There are others such as Iskander Ezz, a translator, who wants to instigate reform from inside the system, but his sister, Damietta, a gifted artist, wants to bring it all down. Stability on the Safina sits on a knife edge. Much of the action is focalised
through the Ezz family, but chapters are also devoted to other characters connected to the family, such as Iskander’s roommate Kalila. The novel’s polyphony is one of its greatest strengths: El Sayed uses the multiple charac- ter perspectives to expertly navi- gate the interplay between reform, revolution and violence. “There’s no right answer really,” El Sayed
space” for Arabfuturism, a cultural subgenre in visual art and writing. “I don’t know if I want to define it… I really don’t want to [but] I would say it’s Middle Eastern, or MENA [Middle East and North Africa] or SWANA [South West Asia and North Africa]… stories set in the future, in our future.” He adds: “I think it’s important to write our stories or these kinds of stories in the future. If characters like me and stories that represent me aren’t [set] in the future, then something terrible must have happened to me in the present.” The “emotional” inspiration for
the novel came from El Sayed’s regret he was not in Egypt to take part in the protests that would become known as the Arab Spring. He pitched the novel as “the Arab Spring in space”, adding: “I guess this was my way of experiencing it, connecting to it.” He continues: “I was in London and working as a translator. I remember a bunch of my friends were like ‘We’re going, are you coming with us?’ And I went, ‘No, you’re gonna go and get beaten up by the police.’ They went and then I reconsidered, [but] then the airport was closed and I couldn’t go. I missed this pivotal event.” He also wanted to highlight a
says when we meet in a quiet pub in Walthamstow. “There is just what you believe and what you’re prepared to do and what you’re prepared to sacrifice to get what you want.” The crew live in “berths” that are
differentiated by the culture and language spoken in each. This is what makes Iskander’s work crucial. His role as a translator is to mediate between the crew and Admin, who only communicate in “Inglez”, a second language to most people on the Safina. A former translator himself, El Sayed also constructed a new language called Nupol, described in the novel as “the prattle of the disenfranchised”. It combines
elements of English, Spanish, Italian and Polari and is largely spoken by the Safina’s underclass and revolutionaries as a way of communicating safely. As with Anthony Burgess’ The Clockwork Orange, the author chose not to include a glossary of Nupol terms, but readers should not be daunted. El Sayed likens writing Nupol to composing jazz, creating the language through intuition rather than strict guidelines. Reading it is similar. Readers will quickly get into a flow state, interpreting Nupol with relative ease. Rather than taking inspiration
from the SF canon, El Sayed was “working against” it to “claim
“gap between understandings”, namely how “people in the west misunderstand what the Arab Spring was and what happened subsequently… I think in the west the Arab Spring ends with the president resigning. Everyone cheers and goes home. We live happily ever after. That’s how stories can end, but real life is a lot more complicated”. And the novel revels in this complexity, offering no utopic statements or easy conclusions about the right or wrong way to initiate systemic change. Hurriya means “freedom” in
Arabic and the question of whether the crew will win theirs or even make it to the planet is undecided. This novel has the potential to become a classic, El Sayed has created an intricate, literary work of SF that is a much-needed addition to the canon. It is time to board the Safina.
REPORTING Katie Fraser
Gollancz, 14th May, HB, £22, 9781399626330
07
Debuts of the Year Author Profile
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68
