Tributes to men of literature

Sami Khashaba: 1939-2008

Al-Ahram Weekly pays tribute to three Egyptian intellectuals who died late last month

 

Sami Khashaba, former deputy editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram who died last week, is a man who cannot easily be forgotten by anyone who worked with him or knew him well. For behind the well-composed and rather reserved persona which he assumed with strangers or with people with whom he did not care to engage, there was a mischievously engaging man with a sly sense of humour and a sharply critical mind who gave liberally of his time, knowledge and emotions to those who came close to him.

I was fortunate enough to have known Sami Khashaba when he was still working at the cultural section of the newspaper Al-Messa in the early 1970s before he moved to Al-Ahram in 1978. At that time, the culture pages of Al-Messa -- a daily evening paper with a rather limited circulation -- and its weekly literary supplement were the place of choice for avant-garde young writers, poets and critics to publish their works, something which was made possible because of the presence of both the late Abdel-Fattah El-Gamal and Sami Khashaba as literary editors.

Khashaba's office at Al-Messa, not far from the coffee houses on Emad Eddin Street in Cairo, was the place where I met many of the writers of the generation of the 1960s, and from his office we would head to one of the nearby cafes and wait for Sami to finish his work and join us. It was also at that time that I discovered Sami's wealth of knowledge of the humanities and his generosity in coaching young people like myself, as well as his willingness to lend many of the rare books collected by his father, Derini Khashaba, a classicist who had translated Homer among other classical authors into Arabic, once he trusted the person in front of him.

Sami was himself an accomplished translator, whose first published translation was of British writer Colin Wilson's Voyage to a Beginning. Wilson's 1956 book The Outsider, which deals with the experience of people who don't fit in and are at odds with society, had cast a long shadow over the 1960s generation in Egypt, and it was probably the book that first drew this generation's attention to the works of Herman Hesse, Franz Kafka and Albert Camus, among others.

Perhaps the attraction of Wilson's book to young Egyptian writers at the time lay in the fact that it seemed to echo something of their own dilemmas. In an interview with Wilson that appeared in The Guardian newspaper 50 years after The Outsider was published, Wilson said that in his book he had wanted to investigate what happened to "these moods of tremendous happiness that the Romantics felt, when they believed that life was absolutely glorious and couldn't imagine that anybody would want to die. Then they woke up the next morning thinking 'what the bloody hell was that all about?'"

Something akin to that wake-up call happened to the young writers of Egypt who had welcomed the Egyptian revolution in the early 1950s only to find themselves treated as the enemy a few years later, with many of them being put in prison or concentration camps in the late 1950s and early 60s and accused of subversion.

Khashaba himself was placed under arrest for several months in 1959 while he was still a university student and accused of having communist sympathies. Following his release, he returned to university where he finished his studies in journalism, obtaining a BA in 1960. It was then that he started to translate Wilson's works, beginning with Voyage to a Beginning, and following it with Access to Inner Worlds, a book which could be considered as a pendant to The Outsider. Shortly after that he was offered employment at Al-Messa, where he helped to attract all Egypt's "Angry Young Men" to the publication.

By the mid-1970s, he had produced an impressive body of work, and in 1978 he moved to Al-Ahram where he edited the cultural section of the newspaper's weekend edition, the Friday Supplement. Having known Sami Khashaba in the 1970s when I was training to be a journalist, our paths diverged for almost 15 years while I was living abroad, only to converge again when I came to work for Al-Ahram in 1990 when preparations were underway for the launch of Al-Ahram Weekly.

By this time Sami was a senior journalist in Al-Ahram, and he was involved in the work of the central desk responsible for producing the Arabic daily paper in addition to his work on the Friday Supplement. It was to Sami Khashaba that the founding editor of the Weekly, the late Hosny Guindy, turned for advice regarding the editorial policy of our own culture section. As always, he was generous with his time and knowledge, recommending and selecting material for the Weekly and helping us to identify potential contributors for the paper.

It was always a joy for me to get a call from Sami Khashaba on the day following the Weekly 's appearance, congratulating us on good coverage of some cultural event or other, or drawing our attention to an event we had missed, something he did throughout the 17 years of the Weekly 's existence. He will be very sorely missed.

By Mona Anis

Al-Ahram Weekly Online