The Crocodiles

by Youssef Rakha

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Set in Cairo between 1997 and 2011, The Crocodiles is narrated in numbered, prose poem-like paragraphs, set against the backdrop of a burning Tahrir Square, by a man looking back on the magical and explosive period of his life when he and two friends started a secret poetry club amid a time of drugs, messy love affairs, violent sex, clumsy but determined intellectual bravado, and retranslations of the Beat poets. Youssef Rakha’s provocative, brutally intelligent novel of growth and change begins with a suicide and ends with a doomed revolution, forcefully capturing thirty years in the life of a living, breathing, daring, burning, and culturally incestuous Cairo.

Release date: December 9, 2014

Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Print pages: 256

Sample

1. On the twenty-first birthday of a poet, ostensibly of our group, whom we knew as Nayf (his real name’s not so very important)—on June 20, 1997, to be precise—the activist Radwa Adel went to visit a relative in one of Cairo’s neighborhoods. I don’t remember which. There is no documented account of this journey by the Student Movement’s (or the Seventies Generation’s) most celebrated female icon (i.e. the activist, though we might call her intellectual, writer, great thinker: they’re all synonyms); there’s even a dispute over whether the relative in question lived on the eleventh floor or the twelfth. But what I have picked up over the years, in casual conversation with close friends of hers from the circle out of which our group grew, is that Radwa Adel played with her relative’s children for a little while, then took herself off for an afternoon nap in the bedroom with the balcony. There was nobody at home but the young children, and no sooner had the bedroom door swung back behind her than she went out onto the balcony and jumped over the wall.

3. On the day of Nayf’s twenty-first birthday, within hours of Radwa Adel’s suicide and shortly after midnight, Secret Egyptian Poetry was born in Doqqi Square, and it seemed as though the working-class wedding whose din drowned out our voices in the café (likewise working-class) had been put on expressly to celebrate this event. The wedding was in Dayir Al Nahya, a short walk from the section of pavement we monopolized alongside the Al Sobki butcher’s in Tahrir Street, and we were unable to see anything from where we sat. In the end, we didn’t get up to take a look at the wedding, but the cawing cry, framed by the nauseating electronic jangling emanating from the loudspeaker, conveyed to us an ungovernable pleasure and, at the same time, further confirmation of our conviction that poetry, the thing we could believe was poetry, must needs be secret.

7. Despite the dramatic rise in The Crocodiles’ numbers in the months that followed, by the start of 1998, all that was left of those early members were one or two talentless poets. Under the influence of an artist with whom he was then in love, Paulo devised an equation governing the relationship between writing secret poetry and literary success in the traditional sense (literary success being, of course, an impossible dream at that period in Egypt but one that, in one form or another, was still taken seriously within our circle). As for Nayf—coming into his own as a computer expert, acquiring an engineering degree from Cairo University and translating American poetry from the 1950s—he kept returning to the idea of giving up writing altogether.

12. There’s something in one of Wadih Saadeh’s poems—I don’t remember the context—about a future that dangles down, for which the speaker spreads a net in the valley that it may arrive intact, or at least does so for its suitcase, the suitcase in which it sits and in which it arrives. I know now that we never drew nets for our future, or its suitcase. We carried the suitcase carelessly, flinging it down to fall as it may. Maybe we thought of the future as too sublime a thing for its shape to be dictated by suitcases and so we did not acknowledge the end of The Crocodiles when it happened, and then, four years after that, our lives were visited by the supernatural.