In his promising first novel, What I Know About You, Éric Chacour revives the vibrant and cosmopolitan Cairo that his parents knew: that of the Sporting Club, the melodies of Mohamed Mounir, the songs of Dalida and Demis Roussos, the scents of cumin , coriander, fried onions, burnt garbage, hot beans and jasmine… It is also the story of the Chawams, a Christian and Francophile Levantine community, which became foreign to Egypt shaped by the Nasserist ambitions of the reconquest of Arab identity, and the rise of Islamism a little later. Without falling into a historical or sociological novel, the novelist uses the decline of this community as a backdrop to illustrate the fall of his main character, Tarek Seidah.
Faithful to a childhood promise made before understanding that “one should be wary of simple questions”, Tarek follows in his father’s footsteps, becomes a brilliant doctor, gets married and thus embodies the perfect model of success, without ever giving up question his progress. His life changes the day he finally makes a decision for himself and opens a dispensary in the disadvantaged district of Moqattam. It is there that he meets Ali, “a bad boy”, in whom he quickly discovers his alter ego, the incarnation of what he could have been without the constraints and the weight of social responsibilities: “Ali fascinated you. There was absolute freedom in him, an absence of calculation, an exaltation of the present. He was not bound by any past and did not see the future through the same constraints as you. »
Tarek and Ali become closer after an innocent kiss revealing to the doctor a part of himself that he had undoubtedly repressed. From then on, a complex relationship is born between these two beings who are separated by everything (age, religion, social environment, education, etc.) and who only have in common the simple fact of being men. A trait which ends up condemning them, because Cairo in the 1980s is not fertile ground for a homosexual affair, even less so for a married man!
Indeed, Omar Bey, one of his patients who also had a clandestine affair with Ali, spread the rumor threatening Tarek’s career and life: “it is always convenient to cleanse one’s soul from the vice of others.” Faced with this outburst, Om Tarek intervenes like a deus ex-machina, seeking to save his son’s family. She then puts in place a stratagem intended to separate the two lovers, and which Ali, resigned, ends up accepting: “He was only the doctor’s assistant. Of the man, the lover. You had confined it to crumbs of your existence, supporting roles without ambition. You had never given up anything for him. You had simply shared a little of your stifling present, where your mother offered him a future. »
Torn between the reason which encourages him to maintain his relationship with his wife, and his blind passion for Ali, Tarek finds himself forced to go into exile in Montreal. To depict the episodes taking place in Canada, Chacour, with his suggestive writing, opts for a cinematographic narration emphasizing the atony, even the symbolic death of the hero who only returns to Egypt after fifteen years for the funeral of his mother, without knowing that an invisible force, the mektoub, is manipulating the cards of his destiny.
This derailment, “that of a man whose life resembles a score already written and who refused to play it”, is told by an enigmatic narrator whose life has been shaped by the absence of Tarek and who speaks to him in the form of a long letter, taking on the appearance of an interior monologue. This unexpected witness who only reveals himself in the last third of the story, allowing the novel to take on its full scope, attempts to resuscitate this absent person who ends up occupying all the space: “The sum of my deductions ended up telling a story: yours. Or to be exact, my story about you. »
Through this impossible love story, both dramatic and tender, Éric Chacour depicts the crushing of men by the responsibilities imposed on them, but also that of women by the responsibilities that are refused to them, and questions the nature of freedom which is ultimately only an illusion. Believing he is choosing his own path, Tarek finds himself trapped by a destiny he never really had the ability to control. The real tragedy lies here. And in this simple question that, according to the author, many refuse to ask themselves as its answer can be dizzying: “What would the child that I was have said of the adult that I have become? »
What I know about you by Éric Chacour, Philippe Rey, 2023, 304 p.
In his promising first novel, What I Know About You, Éric Chacour revives the vibrant and cosmopolitan Cairo that his parents knew: that of the Sporting Club, the melodies of Mohamed Mounir, the songs of Dalida and Demis Roussos, the scents of cumin , coriander, fried onions, burnt garbage, hot beans and jasmine… It is also the story of the Chawams,…
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