The Dissenters
“I plan to ask Mouna about it, but in the sound and the fury of her dying, I forget.”
FEBRUARY 4, 2025
Dear Shimo:
Do you remember the disused attic on the way to the roof of our one-story house? That cramped, dust-coated space where Mouna used to keep a small safe among Baba’s hard-bound law books. It occurs to me now that, however often she passed it, Mouna almost never went inside.
I don’t suppose you’d imagine me going in the attic either, any more than you’d expect a letter from me. You were the reason I first stole up there, while Mouna was still alive. Since then something has come unstuck in my access to time, and I’ve found I can experience events that happened before I was born just as well as the episodes that marked me. Mouna might be beggaring my soul for spending too much in Alexandria or she might be jumping about in a mini skirt, unrecognizable.
Either way her body is there in front of me. The door to her mind is open in a way that it never was in her lifetime. And, stepping through that door, enraptured and disconsolate, I walk further and further into her life. Living, reliving it — I’m either her or an infinitely versatile camera trailing her. Sometimes I’m both Mouna and the camera.
But — here’s the thing, Shimo — the more time I spend in the attic, the more it feels like a debt to myself to reconcile you to her.
Swollen with the knowledge I’ve gulped down, I know I have to share it all with you. No matter how I reach out, you remain 7,000 miles away, I know. But if you were here and we had the business of living between us, how much of this stippled story could I really tell?
I marvel at my desire for Mouna, a Mouna that is and is not my mother. And, thinking again of your absence, certain as I’ve never been of anything in the world that you have a right or a duty to know, that you absolutely must know, I sail through the mouth of that river into the sea of her life.
⁂
Like a bridal wraith I see the girl she once was haunting the bedstead, one hand hovering above her groom.
In its lined broadcloth pajamas the portly figure lies on its back, arms crossed over chest like a dead pharaoh, ensconced in a lattice of sunlight. She brushes his nightcap: no response. She whispers, nudging his hairy hand. When she plucks up the courage to slip her hands under his shoulders and pull the man snarls and she flinches. As he begins to snore again his motionlessness is such that she backs out of the door, unnerved.
In all things Amna’s mother Bara Hanim walks behind her eldest daughter like a blindfolded water buffalo, which in the six remaining girls’ affairs makes Arwa the despot of the Wahib Abu Zahra household.
She wants to wake him to ask what to say when her sister arrives. The marital apartment is in Shoubra, the same neighborhood as her father’s house, so the sister who lives in the same building won’t be long now. She will find her still in her wedding dress, bedraggled and bruised but dry where she should be bloodied.
Amna knows that, since this is her sabahiyya, her eldest sister Arwa will show up demanding the family’s sharaf in the form of a stained piece of cloth spread over the bedsheet in the marital bed. The staining is of course the responsibility of Mansour Effendi, the 40-year-old husband she had only just met when she arrived at this apartment the night before. But she knows she is the one Arwa will question.
In all things Amna’s mother Bara Hanim walks behind her eldest daughter like a blindfolded water buffalo, which in the six remaining girls’ affairs makes Arwa the despot of the Wahib Abu Zahra household. Amna is the third youngest, the most recent to be married by a crack of Arwa’s whip.
Last night, in his final bound for the fugitive hard-on, the bookkeeper had seated her bodily on the dresser, bared one Alphonso mango-like bezz and slowly parted her thighs. He was fully accoutered except for the trousers, long johns and underpants piled over his glossy oxfords, the tassel of his tarboosh primly combed to one side. Even his eyewear in place.
While the schoolgirl blushed, horrified at first, he alternately suckled and lowered his gaze, burbling Allahallahallahallah as he rocked to and fro.
This went on for 20 minutes, punctuated by desperate tugs at the enormous bulbul dangling in state. When her suppressed smile finally registered, he recognized it as a sign of amusement. Then he availed himself of the bathroom — for bed.
The buttock Mansour Effendi had clasped during the evening’s debacle smarts badly. But while she sits cross-legged on the rococo sofa in the hall, braiding her hair, it is over her knees that Amna is brooding.
This is the last term before the Baccalauréat examens and Amna has been absent for a week. She didn’t hand in her devoirs to Madame Estaban, the science teacher, who is sure to have reported her by now. Amna worries that Soeur Laurette will make her cross the playground on her knees, la principale’s favorite punishment. The pain doesn’t frighten her so much as the humiliation of walking around with flaming welts beneath the skirt of her uniform like a misbehaved child.
Now I see her under Mansour’s high ceiling, vaguely regal at the center of the sofa. A compact shape utterly unaware of its gorgeousness.
Her huge hazel eyes with impossibly long lashes stare dreamily ahead. Her long neck is so flimsy you could crush it between forefinger and thumb. The dress, creased, is in all the wrong places on her torso, as if she wore it with the seam to one side. Its glittering train covers one thigh, spotlighting the orange-tinged nudity of the other.
Over the gray plush of the sofa and the black and white tiles below, the chiffon on brocade trails all the way to the brown trunk overflowing with her wardrobe like a disemboweled carcass. Her auburn hair shades half her face as her hands weave mechanically. She is tiny.
Lying back on the floor of the attic at the top of our house, I see her. Her face crumples as she thinks of those welts, her snub nose swelling over fat pursed lips. And I almost hear the plea forming in her head. It is 19th-century French but broken. And it falters before the steely stare of the elderly French nun.
Her huge hazel eyes with impossibly long lashes stare dreamily ahead. Her long neck is so flimsy you could crush it between forefinger and thumb.
I see the casuarina-flanked sand of the playground, the arch above the staircase into the Moorish citadel-style building. I see her in white shirt, white skirt, a navy blue tie resting on her cleavage under the unforgiving sun. Her pigtails hang over her bowed head while she waits on the steps. But no sooner does the image take form than she is back in her marital apartment, standing before Arwa like a child being reprimanded.
✺
Carrying herself like a septuagenarian at 35, the large, plain sister has curled one hand and is tapping it irritably with the other. A helix of gold snake bangles on each of her wrists jingles mutedly meanwhile.
— But what was I to do wennabi ya Abla Arwa?
The tapping quickens as Arwa grumbles, glaring at her little sister. The black cloak covering her immense bulk shimmers over a fuchsia sack dress. Below the mauve écharpe around her head, a thick portière of jet-black hair hangs over penciled eyebrows.
Together with excessive kohl this gives her small, dark eyes a hard, inanimate quality. But there is no way you can tell she is thinking of gold — the gold her late husband’s cousin, Mansour Effendi’s mother Hagga Hafiza, had pushed into her lap. Alluding to the groom’s exceptional penis size, Hagga Hafiza had winked and bitten her lip while she did.
— A maiden bride untouched on her sabahiyya, Arwa wails, who ever heard of such a thing? And the man, mashallah, so well endowed by reputation. What, Lord, can we say to Wahib Bey?
For three years, since the declaration of the republic, Arwa has been referring to her father by his supposed title.
— And even if the Bey is appeased, she goes on, what will the Omda say?
Amna cowers at the mention of her eldest brother Umair, the educational failure who, since he oversees the village into which her father’s estate has turned, has taken on the title of village omda.
By now the debonair only child of herculean height and hawkish features has frittered away the family fortune. When the young republican regime starts taking over private property, he has hardly anything left for it to nationalize.
— And the man, mashallah — what lies will Mansour Effendi’s family spread about us now, Arwa carries on.
It is Amna that I hear, a while later on the same day. In the tactful Arabic of 60 years ago, she’s asking Abla Arwa whether it might be better if she eats before scrubbing the kitchen floor, as her abla says she must. Amna has not slept a wink and, now that she has faced her sister, she can feel how hungry she has been.
Then I see her in a petticoat on all fours in the kitchen, sobbing while she scrubs.
⁂
Later, four years after the revolution when it is over and I am ready to move along, I recall that it was Mouna who drew my attention to the Jumpers. At first it was professional interest that drove me: a reporter on the trail of a scoop. But it soon felt like something much bigger, much more personal than journalism could ever be:
Women of all ages and circumstances stepping over windowsills and leaping across balustrades, unaccountably killing themselves in the thick of protests and lies.
By 2012 I won’t be as interested in the revolution itself as all those women — thousands of them spreading out of Cairo to Alexandria and Suez, all the demonstration hubs, one after another testing the destructive power of gravity — for no apparent reason.
Tipped off by the mother he lives with, the seasoned journalist doing some extra work: I did not yet realize what the attention she paid the Jumpers would end up doing to her.
Their story feels like the boat I’ve taken down the river of the revolution — one officer out of the presidency and, past the election and ouster of a sheikh, another in — but where has that cyclical course delivered me?
In the cramped, dust-coated attic where I’ve been lying back to gulp down knowledge, Shimo, it feels like a debt to myself to convince you of how like the mother you resented you really are. How your revolution against her was a version of her revolution. To tell you of her as I saw her in the last four years of her life, and of the 60 years before that as they’re revealed to me. To tell you of the revolution that you missed. But perhaps most importantly of all to tell you of the Jumpers. How strange it was that they existed, how frustrating that no one paid any attention to them except Mouna.
By 2012 I won’t be as interested in the revolution itself as all those women—thousands of them spreading out of Cairo to Alexandria and Suez, all the demonstration hubs, one after another testing the destructive power of gravity—for no apparent reason.
She was still alive the first time I visited the attic, five days after I brought her home from hospital.
Mouna insisted that I drive her myself — in the Burakmobile. Remember the heart-shaped scratch on the bumper, which you called Bug Wing? I stowed the stretcher in front of the back seat where she lay. Everything went smoothly at first, but then at the U-turn she skidded sideways and slipped half onto the floor, exposing her legs. When she asked me to help her and I pulled over next to a fruit stall, that was the first I saw of the transformation: It was unlike her to make a request without invoking either God or His Messenger.
— Don’t look too harshly on the cripple you’ve been burdened with ya habibi, she said, almost without emotion. I promise you it won’t be long now. Besides, these legs aren’t even worth looking at now. Imagine seeing them in their prime! Only a behim and the son of a behim could fail to covet them.
Suddenly she was laughing, as much as anyone lying paralyzed in a VW Beetle can laugh. She had the same look you used to give me when I teased you about your boyfriends.
— Don’t you doubt it, son of Amin. It wasn’t just famous artists they tempted. C’est vrai! Forget this decaying carcass you see in front of you. You would’ve gone deranged over a single glimpse.
I don’t suppose I was wide-eyed so much as thin-lipped, hearing this. Something in her voice released the weeping clockwork which the last four years had been steadily winding. Only three weeks prior she’d been in good health. Her body was frail and ruined, but whole. Yet just that morning the registrar who’d been following her case, coordinating the work of three different consultants, had patiently taken me through the cardiological and orthopedic procedures she’d undergone, explaining that due to age and hypertension — diabetes, too — no more surgery was possible.
— Her condition is stable for the time being, the young man sounded apologetic. But if internal hemorrhage were to recur or if the medication fails to prevent the re-emergence of hemothorax — he broke off, looking down timidly.
Suddenly I was struggling not to sob in the car.
Later I thought maybe what had dammed up my tears since the Cataclysm was knowing how resigned she would be to her death at 76, a devout believer. As if her being okay with it would make it okay for me too. Not that she’d blasphemed enough in that moment to suggest she’d given up hope of an afterlife. But what she said made it clear to me that, whatever she herself felt, for me her death was not okay.
— Bas bas, bas bas, I heard her rasping when I was driving again. Don’t cry, light of my eyes.
It was another five minutes before I could turn on the ignition.
— A life is only worth as much as a life is worth, she went on. Besides, you’ve been a good son.
At first I assumed it was a lapse, all that godless talk of putrefaction and desire. But I was near her for the rest of the day and she did not perform salah once. She was lucid, almost in her element. Even her hearing seemed to improve, but her elaborate way of speaking now omitted religious references. At night I listened for the sotto voce invocations I’d heard her repeating for decades. Nothing.
Something in her voice released the weeping clockwork which the last four years had been steadily winding. Only three weeks prior she’d been in good health. Her body was frail and ruined, but whole.
The next day I asked as casually as I could whether she wasn’t going to perform salah.
— No, she said simply, giving no explanation.
There was an overtone of some kind — defiance or distress, perhaps simply disillusion — but it was so subtle I could just barely detect it.
— Do me a favor, will you, habibi, she added after a while. Find me a book by Ihsan Abd El Quddous. I’m sure they’re hidden away somewhere here in the house. Will you look for the sake of your Mouna?
I don’t know if you can imagine, Shimo. Mouna hasn’t touched a non-religious book since before you were born. Whimpering with joy and grief, I begin to scour through the bookshelves, Baba’s filing cabinet, and the oddest piece of furniture in the house: an ancient mahogany secretaire with marble top and satinwood interior. I’m searching not just for what she wants but also for a black-and-white photograph in which she looks young enough to be my daughter, an image that’s been haunting me since she came out of hospital. It’s not much bigger than a playing card, and I know she has never housed it in a photo album.
I find it. On the back is one line in her hand, which has not changed 50 years on: At Serag and Samira’s, celebrating Amin’s release. May 26, 1964. I slide it next to the ID in my wallet, so it can be with me wherever I go.
I find the photograph alongside a similarly sized, framed print that I don’t remember seeing before. A black-and-brown lithograph, signed Aziz Maher, Egypt’s best-known artist of the 1960s. I plan to ask Mouna about it, but in the sound and the fury of her dying, I forget. The lithograph shows her face at more or less the time of the photograph, executed with an expert but unfeeling naturalism. The face is instantly recognizable, pretty as anything. But its mischief, its ingenuousness, the shadow of that bitter look of hers that hangs over it — everything that makes it hers — is omitted. I leave it where I found it.
I find the books too, yellowed and brittle underneath the sensational drawings of couples kissing on their covers.
Five days later I will force Mouna’s eyelids down and ease the wedding ring off her finger. I will remove her neck support, slip off her stud earrings and unlatch the antique gold watch she called Ramona to slide it off her wrist. And from the moment I return to her room with the books till I do this, not once will the television be turned on. For the rest of her life Mouna will be absorbed in the starry-eyed, politely sexual romances of her youth’s bestselling novelist.
⁂
In our house there is an attic where I follow in your footsteps, Shimo, doing penance once I am sated and sad. Suffering the premonition that tomorrow will indeed be the last day. Sleeping by the corpse when tomorrow comes. And, the day after tomorrow, watching the corpse washer strip and scrub its unbending contours. Foaming water in the crooks, the clefts, all the shame sites.
I’m searching not just for what she wants but also for a black-and-white photograph in which she looks young enough to be my daughter, an image that’s been haunting me since she came out of hospital.
With Mouna’s passing, I tell myself, the story has come full circle. The story of the revolution and how it changed her, which you missed, but also the story to which that railway image from 1963 belongs. And which begins to play out in my head the minute I go back up to the attic after the funeral.
If anyone can understand this, honestly.
I’ve lived here since my divorce in January 2010, Shimo, moving back in just in time for the climax of your lifelong feud with Mouna. I’d moved in not planning on staying longer than a few weeks, but it was left to me to comfort her when you suddenly moved out, and again after you got on that plane without saying goodbye. When I ended up staying longer and longer, I told myself it was to take care of Mouna. Then I told myself it was because I was depressed. But I was making excuses.
I suppose what the revolution did to her would’ve made me stay anyway. But the truth is that at some level I knew my marriage had failed because I was this woman’s son. I’d moved out of Maadi just after meeting Aya, though we didn’t marry until three years later. I was convinced I was free of Mouna when I did, but once I had a real partner I expected the same desperate, broken love Mouna had given me, and when I got something different I grew cold. A small but inexorable part of me had been determined to disappoint Aya exactly as Baba had disappointed Mouna as well. And, without once articulating it even to myself, I decided that staying on with Mouna was the remedy or the punishment I deserved.
With her passing I can finally look forward to moving along with my life — not just leaving Maadi — but only once I’ve told you both her stories. So that you too know about the Jumpers. Maybe one day you’ll read my letters to your daughter, telling her they’re by the uncle who became his own mother. Who, scraping the underside of the Egyptian revolution of 2011, realized this is what it was about.
The story has come full circle, I tell myself. And, thinking of your absence, certain as I’d never been of anything that you must know, I’m hunched over this keyboard writing you like a desperate correspondent filing a report directly from the battlefront.
A middle-aged man lost, going in circles around the women who have made me. And only your reading this holds any promise of arrival.
Your loving brother,
Nour
Excerpted from The Dissenters. Copyright © 2025 by Youssef Rakha. Used with the permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.
✺ Published in “Issue 25: Ghosts” of The Dial
