Naguib Mahfouz's "A Palace Walk"

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz Novel Report

This report is based on the novel “Palace Walk”, written by Naguib Mahfouz. The book was originally published in 1956 with the title Bayn al-qasrayn (Between the Two Palaces), it book was translated into English in 1990. With this report, we are going to view the novel in a historical perspective accompanied with the concepts involving post-colonial Africa which we learned in class since the novel centers on the events which happened during the First World War in 1917 until the year of the nationalist revolution in 1919 in Cairo, Egypt. 

Introduction of the Author                              

Naguib Mahfouz was born in Cairo in 1911. He began writing when he was seventeen. His first novel was published in 1939 and ten more were written before the Egyptian Revolution of July 1952, when he stopped writing for several years. One novel was republished in 1953, however, and the appearance of the Cairo Triology, Bayn al Qasrayn, Qasr al Shawq, Sukkariya (Between-the-Palaces, Palace of Longing, Sugarhouse) in 1957 made him famous throughout the Arab world as a depictor of traditional urban life. With The Children of Gebelawi (1959), he began writing again, in a new vein that frequently concealed political judgements under allegory and symbolism.

Until 1972, he was employed as a civil servant, first in the Ministry of Mortmain Endowments, then as Director of Censorship in the Bureau of Art, as Director of the Foundation for the Support of the Cinema, and, finally, as consultant on Cultural Affairs to the Ministry of Culture. He is the author of no fewer than thirty novels, more than a hundred short stories, and more than two hundred articles. Half of his novels have been made into films which have circulated throughout the Arabic-speaking world. In Egypt, each new publication is regarded as a major cultural event.

Characters

Palace Walk is the story of the Jawad family.

·       Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad – the father of the family. He is a shop-keeper, a business he inherits from his father. He is a strict disciplinarian; his entire family respects him but also lives in considerable fear of him. His expectations are so high, and he so demanding, that a good deal is actually kept from him: white lies and evasiveness are the norm, meaning that he often isn't entirely aware of what is going on. 

·       Amina—the novel begins with her description. She is the one who is always at home. She is entirely subservient to her husband ("My opinion is the same as yours, sir. I have no opinion of my own", she dutifully tells him), having reconciled herself "to a type of security based on surrender". Surrounded by her family -- two daughters, two sons, and a stepson -- she is content with her lot, despite the fact that her strict husband forbids her to go out alone, which means she spends almost her entire life entirely within the confines of the house. 

·       Yasin—he is the eldest son of al-Sayyid Ahmad from his previous relationship. He lived with his real mother until he was nine, and then was "transferred to his father's custody". He is happy living in this household, and convinces himself that his stepmother "is the entire mother I need", but his real mother resurfaces as an inescapable part of his life. Yasin, who is already working, takes after his father in his desire for personal gratification: drink and especially sex tempt him greatly.

·      Fahmy—he is a university student: serious, devout, and with a budding political conscience, the one in the family who becomes most engaged in the national struggle for change.

·       Kamal—he is the youngest child and still a schoolboy.

·       Khadija—the eldest daughter, she was already twenty when the book begins.

·       Aisha—the younger daughter, she was only sixteen when the book begins. She is the beauty of the family although she has problems with her being skinny.

Summary

Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad is the tyrannical head of his household, demanding total, unquestioning obedience from his wife, Amina, his sons, Yasin, Fahmy and Kamal, and his daughters, Khadija and Aisha.

Major elements of the plot include al-Sayyid Ahmad's philandering, Yasin's cultivation of the same hobbies, Fahmy's refusal to cease his political activities despite his father's order, and the day-to-day stresses of living in the Abd al-Jawad house, in which the wife and children must delicately negotiate certain issues of sexual chastity and comportment that cannot be discussed openly. Through the novel, Yasin and Fahmy gradually become aware of the exact nature of their father's night-time activities, largely because Yasin begins an affair with a young courtesan who works in the same house as al-Sayyid Ahmad's lover. After glimpsing his father playing the tambourine at a gathering in the house Yasin understands where his father goes at night, and is pleased to find that they have similar interests. Amina, meanwhile, has long ago guessed her husband's predilections, but represses her resentment and grief so intensely that she behaves almost wilfully ignorant of the whole matter.

          The family provides the novel with its structure, since the plot is concerned with the lives and interrelationships of its members. However, the story is not set in isolation; indeed, the characters themselves are important mediators between issues of local or wider scope.

The novel's opening chapters focus upon the daily routine of the al-Jawad family. Subsequent chapters proceed to explore the characters of family members, particularly their relationships with one another. The marriage of the children provides a key focus, as do challenges to the supreme authority of the family's patriarch.

Analysis

          The novel all in all is about how change press inexorably against tradition, and even the walls of the house cannot keep it outside, which means that the great changes happening outside the house eventually intrude and conquered the ones living in the house. Let us tackle the subjects prevalent in the novel.

Traditional beliefs are very established in the novel. They are the following:

·       Marriage Customs

-        The women do not have the right to choose who will be their husbands. The obligation of choosing the rightful husband for the girls is only with the hands of the father. The bride moves out of her mother’s house to live with her husband, and shall only be allowed to get out only when visiting the parents once in a while and chaperoned by the husband.

-        The elder girl must marry first before the younger girls.

-        There is no courtship, the time the man desires to marry the woman, he sends his relatives to the woman’s house to ask for her hand in marriage.

-        The men are allowed to marry as many women as they wanted, provided they can give what the women and family needs.

·       Duties

-        The men have to work for their family; the women stay at home and do household chores.

-        The wife and the daughters must submit themselves fully to the father and obey everything he says.

Beliefs in spirits/god are also evident in the novel.

·       Jinns

-        They are mentioned in the novel many times. They were described as supernatural creatures in Arab folklore and Islamic mythology that occupy a parallel world to that of mankind. Together, jinn, humans and angels make up the three sentient creations of Allah.

·       Allah/ Muhammad

-        Many passages in the novel were alluded to the Quran and to the Islam god Allah.

The cultural standpoints evident in the novel are:

·       Sex bias/gender roles

-        The father dominates his family through authoritarian rule.  The children must kiss his hands when he is angry with them; his wife, Amina, sits by his feet each night when he returns home from his carousing to take off his shoes and socks.

-        Only the men of the family Yasin, Fahmy and Kamal were allowed to go out of the house and be educated.

-        Women were secluded and compelled to accept their husband's behaviour.

-         The daughters live in complete isolation: they do not go to school and cannot show their faces in public. Their parents' proudest achievement seems to be being able to say: "No man has ever seen either of my daughters since they stopped going to school when they were little girls." The girls' lives revolve entirely around the family household, where they help their mother, looking forward dreamily only to their one great ambition: to get married. Even within the house there is some segregation, as it is unthinkable that the women would eat at the same table as al-Sayyid Ahmad.

·       Nationalism

-        Fahmy, the second son, refuses to comply with Ahmad's order to stop his nationalistic activities. He was inspired by moral principles that Ahmad can neither share nor overrule through the force of personal authority. 

·       Colonialization

-        The foreigners—the Australians, as well as the English colonialists are always present. Eventually the English are literally at the door of the Jawad household, setting up camp to control the demonstrations that break out all over Cairo. Kamal becomes friendly with the soldiers, but the others fear them and are more ambivalent. 

·       Modernization

There were many scenes in the novel which points to modernization

and how it affected the life of the family members.

-        Fahmy disobeyed his father.  A conflict between generations was almost unbelievable in the more stagnant society of earlier periods, when both father and son would have been similarly attuned to the traditional loyalties. Once the standard has been set, one expects repetitions to recur with increasing frequency and diminishing justification. As Ahmad's power diminishes, family relations are on their way towards modernity.

-        Zaynab, briefly the wife of Ahmad's eldest son, wants changes in her position as woman. She insists on going out in the evening with her husband; Amina, the traditional woman, predictably leads the opposition to this notion. More disruptive yet, Zaynab demands a divorce when she finds her husband with another woman. This may not sound like a surprising response, but it was to Ahmad, raised in an entirely different ethic. "There was nothing strange about a man casting out a pair of shoes, but shoes were not supposed to throw away their owner."

-        Other families allow their women to go out in public. Yasin, who eventually does get married (though that doesn't turn out quite the way he'd hoped), causes a major scandal when he takes his wife for an evening on the town, his father outraged that he would disgrace his family in this way.   His wife, Zaynab, used to greater liberties in her father's household finds that already after a month "her character had been infected with the virus of submission" so prevalent in the Jawad household.

-        The two daughters marry and move away, we know that the ropes that bound them are lessening they marry brothers who are far too spoiled and lazy ever to be concerned about values or standards.

-        Letting Aisha marry first before Khadija is doing away with the tradition of marrying off the elder daughter first before the younger ones.

-        Comparing Khadija with her mother Amina, Mahfouz writes, "The two women might have been a single person with her image reflected forward to the future or back into the past. In either case, the difference between the original and its reflection revealed the terrible struggle raging between the laws of heredity, attempting to keep things the same, and the law of time, pushing for change and a finale."

Conclusion

          All in all, Palace Walk is very much a family portrait. The focus of the novel is on the Jawad household, and the house on Palace Walk. Each family member is well-developed, and each serves a purpose – Kamal, who sees things through a child's eyes, playboy Yasin, political Fahmy, beautiful Aisha, and serious Khadija. There are small and big family crises, with the firm hand of the father dominating all – and yet the threat of an inevitable changing world is constantly at the door. The novel presented the struggles of people who were used to following traditions to cope with and adapt the modernizing culture of the new world.

References:

A Palace Walk Review. Boston Globes. Retrieved from http://www.boston.com/globe/ search/ stories/nobel/1990/1990x.html. 2/23/12.

Naguib Mahfouz.Palace Walk. Translated by Hutchkins and Kenny. Ancor Books, New York. 1990.

Korson, B. (2010). Summary of Palace Walk.

Retrieved from: http://www.allreaders.com/topics/info_2214.asp.

Licitra, J. (2009). In the Eyes of Amina. Universal Journals.

Retrieved from: http://ayjw.org/articles.php?id=646920.