Once in a while there comes a book that manages to capture the mood of the times and the spirit of an entire generation for the sake of posterity. Alijah Gordon's Time of the Mishmish (2002) reads as one such text. Set in Egypt during the tumultuous period when the star of the charismatic and legendary Egyptian leader Gammel Abdel Nasser was on the rise, it tells the story of a complex nation desperately waiting for answers and looking to the future. These were "proud days to remember, days of baby steps", as Egypt was seeking its place and voice on the stage of global politics.

The opening lines of the text sums up the collective hopes, longings, pain and anxieties of that first generation of Egyptians who lived under the long shadow cast by their charismatic leader:

"Hope is born of dark places, mixes itself with dirty faces, seeps into the looking of trachoma-distorted eyes; persists in camps; goes madly in prisons; in the obscurity and mediocrity of an office clerk does it reside. Hope: man's condemnation and man's release."

But the Egypt of the Mishmish was also one that was anxiously "waiting for the fall of the regime, the backsliding of a nation". Surrounded by enemies within and without, the people turned to Gamal Nasser, Gamal 'the beautiful', the "brown faced ruler with Egyptian integrity re-established in his blood'" who promised them that "life would be grand, life would be beautiful". But three years after the Free Officers' coup of 1952, the people were still waiting for freedom and the Parliament they were promised.

Alijah Gordon's narrative recounts her time in Egypt and her own personal impressions of the land and its people: from the persecuted Islamic Brotherhood whose longing was to return to the asylum of a fabled past to the bureaucrats and pen-pushers who could only carry out their paid-for directions; from the nameless peasants whose subaltern voices went unrecorded to the great leader Nasser himself, who believed that he and he alone was the one who revolutionised his country. In this work, the entire country including the land, the cities and the Nile itself comes to life leaving the reader with a vivid impression of the elation and despair of the times.

Nation in waiting

It is also a story of phenomenal successes and disastrous failures, of betrayals and compromises. While the Egyptian people were asking for a comprehensive melody, a meaningful ideology that was their own, their lives and fate were being sold short by politicians and foreign powers conspiring to retain their stranglehold on a country that was not theirs, and on a culture they could never hope to understand.

It is a story of a nation in waiting, of a people longing for the time of the mishmish, the time of the apricots that may yet come, "for a new world that but hesitantly filters through the slats."

The story itself is told via a series of interconnected and related vignettes: a painting of a nation to be in twenty parts. But what parts they are: Alijah's narrative takes the reader wandering into the city-slums, villages and outposts of a nation being built anew. In them we encounter characters whose private lives are invariably part of something much bigger, much greater than they themselves realise.

Like a Proustian observer who notes the contradictions and foibles of the common man, the narrator captures private inner lives of ordinary individuals whose circumstances are anything but ordinary. From the village boys who were forced to work to keep their families alive to the landed urban elite, sweating out their last golden days in the cafes, pockets watches ticking away the last minutes of an era about to come to a close.

The other interesting aspect of the work is the way through which the author manages to connect the world-views of the alienated and atomised members of such a shattered society. Maintaining a sense of critical distance tempered by an artists' sensibility that can only be described as poetic Alijah pieces together the pieces of the broken puzzle that was Egypt during the 1950s.

Portrait and diagnosis

It is here that the literary as well as the political merit of the work lies: Very much in the same vein as Conrad's Nostromo, Alijah brings together the chaotic cacophony of diverse voices and political undercurrents, pointing to the suppressed anger, frustration and violence that was set to boil soon after. In an oblique way, the text reads not only as a portrait of the times but also a diagnosis of the ills of a society on the verge of collapse. One can only ask: could not the elites of Egypt see the same then? What was it that kept them blind to the changes around them?

What is even more important about the text is its immediate relevance for us today. For the first impression that the reader is bound to get is that the Egypt of Alijah's Time of the Mishmish is not some distant land in the past where the people do things differently, but rather a ghostly reminder that haunts us in the present. Reading the Mishmish, one cannot help but come to the simple conclusion that the author's observations made nearly half a century ago remain true and relevant for us now. Egypt in the mid-1950s was a country that was on the verge of imploding, of 'vomiting itself into the streets'. How many Muslim countries of today merit the same observation?

Reading Time of the Mishmish today would therefore be less a step back in time but more a revisiting of the realities creeping up around us. Anyone who fails to see the parallel developments between Egypt of the 1950s and contemporary developments in the Muslim world today would have to be wilfully oblivious to the circumstances they live in.

One is even tempted to recommend the book to the political leaders of the Muslim world in particular, as if saying: "Read this and look at the world around you. Go back to the streets, go back to the people and feel their pulse which you have lost."

It is a great credit for any writer to give voice to those subaltern classes whose personal narratives would have remained unrecorded otherwise. But in her work Alijah Gordon has done more than that: She has given a voice to an entire generation of hopeless yet hopeful souls, waiting for the time of redemption to arrive. In the Time of the Mishmish should be read with a view not only to the past but also the present, and there is where its relevance and importance lies.

ALIJAH GORDON, In the time of the Mishmish. MSRI (Malaysian Sociological Research Institution), Kuala Lumpur. 2002. ISBN no. 983-41001-0-8. 111 pgs.

Dr FARISH A NOOR is a Malaysian political scientist and human rights activist. 'The Other Malaysia' tries to unearth aspects of Malaysia's history and culture that have been erased or relegated to the margins in order to remind us that there remains another Malaysia that is often forgotten.