A Brief Introduction To Modern Arabic Literature - Plot & Excerpts
The title story sets the tone. A group of people are waiting for a bus in Cairo, when bizarre, and increasingly violent, events start to take place around them. Are these events being staged as part of a film, and, if so, where are the cameras and the director? A thief runs past; there is a car crash; a herd of camels and a group of tourists pass by, like images taken from a dream, or from a spectacle that is taking place without reference to those watching it. When the people at the bus stop ask the police to intervene, the police turn their guns on them and shoot them.1 The story might be taken as a bleak verdict on events in the Arab world in the 1960s, but it is by no means alone for that. Regimes across the Arab world had failed to keep their promises with regard either to development goals or to greater democracy and civil liberties. Nasser’s Egypt, which had represented wider hopes across the Arab world, had turned into a police state at home, characterized by fear and a personality cult of an egregious kind.
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