The Map of Love

“I am obsessed with Anna Winterbourne’s brown journal. She has become as real to me as Dorothea Brooke.”

Soueif’s interest in the nature of reality is neatly condensed here. Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, is of course just as fictional as Anna Winterbourne, and as Amal herself, for that matter. Yet, fictional people and dead people have their own reality, different from the reality of the living.

“I walked to the museum and I went to see the paintings. I cannot pretend to a wholly untroubled mind—nor would it be proper now to have one—but I was able, once more, to take pleasure in the wondrous colors, the tranquility, the contentment with which they are infused. And I wondered, as I had wondered before, is that a world which truly exists?” 

This excerpt from Anna’s journal expands upon the book’s questions about the relationship of art to life. In her period of numbness and depression after her husband’s death, Anna cannot take any pleasure in the things that once made her happy. It is art—music, specifically—that at last allows her to fully feel her grief. However, she cannot feel an unequivocal delight any more in the otherworldliness of art; is its world truly accessible?

“I watched my grandmother—my mother’s mother—in her last years: her hand, the skin drawn parchmentlike over the bones, stroking, stroking, the chairs, the table, the bedspread.” 

Interrupting her telling of Isabel’s story, Amal reveals the ways in which her own life experiences inflect her imagining of the stories she tells. She’s just described Jasmine, who has dementia, as stroking the armchair she’s sitting in, and here interjects her own memory of her own grandmother. This moment suggests the complexities of trying to imagine your way into someone else’s story: one’s own life always colors what one can imagine.

“It is a pale, pale grey shading into blue. The card propped up on my dressing table calls this color ‘Drifter.’ The color card has been of no use to me for years, and yet I cannot bring myself to throw it away; it startles me that an object of such beauty should be held in such low esteem—and yet there they were in every B&Q, Sainsbury’s HomeBase, etc., not to mention the specialized paint stores and hardware stores: hundreds of cards, stacked, inviting the most casual passer-by to pick one up, glance at it, and throw it into the nearest bin. But look what it does with the seven basic colors; it lobs you gently into the heart of the rainbow, and turns you loose into blue; allows you to wander at will from one end of blue to the other: seas and skies and cornflower eyes, the tiles of Isfahan and the robes of the Madonna and the cold glint of a sapphire in the handle of a Yemeni dagger. Lie on the line between blue and green—where is the line between blue and green? You can say with certainty ‘this is blue, and that is green’ but these cards show you the fade, the dissolve, the transformation—the impossibility of fixing a finger and proclaiming, ‘At this point blue stops and green begins.’” 

This passage on the beauty and philosophy one can mine from an everyday display of paint chips exemplifies Soueif’s lyrical style and serves as a metaphor for the book’s interest in slippage of time, place, and person. Just as the distinction between the colors is clear and unclear, the distance between the book’s characters can in some ways be drawn (Egyptian/American/English, contemporary/Victorian), but in other ways seems very misty indeed.

“The journals stand alone. I have tried not to read through them, to read only one year at a time. But then I know how the story ends. I don’t think that matters. We always know how the story ends. What we don’t know is what happens along the way.” 

Amal’s research table, cluttered with Anna’s letters and journals, suggests the mystery the narrative slowly reveals. While at this stage of the book, the reader can see that there’s some connection between Amal’s family and Isabel’s, that connection isn’t clear yet. Amal withholds this information from us, pointing out that what’s important is how things come to happen. This collection of journals and letters also suggests that the “end” of a story is not so clear as it might seem; in a way, Anna’s story, in being retold now, has not yet ended.

“‘I said to him—to my Ingelisi—what will she get out of this? Stories and songs in Arabic and she only knows—you’ll excuse me—two words. He said, She’s put it in her head to go. I said, We get her the storytellers here. She sits like this in the garden like their queen—God have mercy on her soul now—and we get her the storytellers and she can choose what she wants to hear, she can listen to Abuzeid, listen to ‘Antar, listen to a mawwal and make of it what she can; he said no, she wants to listen in a coffee shop. And now we’ve gone and what’s happened has happened and what shall we do now, ya Sett Hanim?’” 

Sabir here explains to Layla how Anna came to be riding around dressed as a man. Sabir’s narrative of Anna’s headstrong desire to go out exploring on her own reflects both Anna’s incomprehension of the culture she’s investigating and Soueif’s interest in the different shapes of language. Sabir’s translated speeches remain distinctly Egyptian in their rhythms and turns of phrase. 

“I understood how longing for a place can take you over so that you can do nothing except return, as I did, return and pick at the city, scraping together bits of the place you once knew. But what do you do if you can never return?” 

Amal learns to understand her Palestinian mother’s homesickness after she leaves the country. Her poignant description of wishing to return does double duty here. The difficulty of “going home” is not just in whatever barriers the world might set up: it’s in the way that time transforms what was once familiar.

“He was always the one who said—as he said on this occasion—‘Hasal kheir,’ it ended well, calm down, everything has a solution.” 

Here, Husni’s habitual use of this turn of phrase demonstrates something important about both Egyptian language and Egyptian character. Soueif is interested in the ways in which language both reflects and inflects culture. The notion that “a bad thing that works out well” might be so common a concept to be proverbial gives us a picture not only of Husni’s character but of his culture.

“‘Does it trouble you,’ she asks, ‘that we have to speak in French?’ ‘I like French.’ ‘But does it trouble you that you cannot speak to me in Arabic?’ ‘No. It makes foreigners of us both. It’s good that I should have to come some way to meet you.’” 

This excerpt from a conversation between Anna and Sharif encapsulates some of the big thematic ideas of the book. The idea of French as a third place of meeting between Anna’s native English and Sharif’s native Arabic recalls the earlier image of the paint chips and the unclear place of transformation between blue and green. Places of betweenness are where cultures, languages, and people may try to touch each other.

“An old story and plus ça change and all that. I too did not sleep well last night for I was in a magic garden of my own…” 

In this moment, when Amal links her own past to Anna’s, and to Isabel’s present situation with Omar, comes at the head of a chapter about the political situation in late 1990s Egypt. Connecting all these disparate stories, Amal reflects on both the hard law of cause and effect (the imperialism of Anna’s time has repercussions that are still being felt in the present) and the more mystical similarities that seem to link human stories throughout time. Amal’s use of the French phrase “plus ça change,” reminiscent of Anna and Sharif’s shared French, underscores this theme of meeting-points across history.

“‘History,’ Dr Ramzi says. ‘This is all—’ he waves his hand—’nothing.’ Egypt has been here so long. It has seen many things. In the next millennium—it will still be Egypt.” 

In this conclusion to the political discussion of Chapter 16, Amal’s friend Dr Ramzi brings up a belief in national identity that echoes Isabel’s earlier ideas about the different ways newer and older cultures might encounter the coming millennium. The idea that Egypt will remain Egypt even through political turmoil and epochal change calls into question the nature of identity. This further reinforces the book’s questions about change and continuity: though modern Egypt is very different from ancient Egypt, or even from 19th century Egypt, Dr Ramzi’s assertion suggests that there is more to the identities of place and of people than their outward behavior.

“There must be a way, only we can’t see it yet. A way of making a space for ourselves where we can make the best of ourselves—we just can’t quite see it yet. But things move on and by the time you’ve plotted your position the world around you has changed and you’re running—panting—to catch up. How can you think clearly when you’re running? That is the beauty of the past; there it lies on the table: journals, pictures, a candle-glass, a few books of history. You leave it and come back for it and it ways for you—unchanged. You can turn back the pages, look again at the beginning. You can leaf forward and know the end. And you tell the story that they, the people who lived it, could only tell in part.” 

Amal’s reflection on the nature of the past suggests the darker side of her obsession with the story of Anna and Sharif. The past is a way for her to escape not only the pain and loneliness of her current life, but its uncertainty. An attachment to the past can provide a defense from the lived reality of the present.

“In Layla’s account of him I see my own brother, and in Anna’s I find the dark, enigmatic hero of Romance. And now it falls to me to weave all these strands together and write Sharif Basha al-Baroudi as the man I imagine he must have been.” 

Amal’s understanding of the many different filters through which she is seeing her own great-uncle draws the reader’s attention to yet another filter: the art of the writer. Soueif here skirts a postmodern self-awareness, describing the attempt to describe a real man who is in fact a fictional man. The reader is asked here to consider the nature of literary reality.

“Speaking is no good, ya habibti. Ask one with experience and don’t ask the physician. Talk goes forward and backward and each understands it as he desires.” 

This advice to Isabel from the woman at the museum adds a layer of complexity to the book’s understanding of communication. While many of the characters’ intense feelings are made clear to the reader, Omar’s feelings for Isabel are presented a little more murkily. In this story of communication across borders, Soueif acknowledges that language has its limits. Amal’s imagining of the Victorian characters’ life stories is a related part of this pattern: she is aware that she is only making words out of words, building her own vision of a lost world.

“‘Isabel,’ I say, ‘sometimes I think of people, or places, and the image is so strong that I’m quite shocked when I realize it was only in my head.’ ‘They were there,’ she says, ‘just as you and I are here.’” 

In another moment of truth in storytelling, Isabel insists that the people she met in the shrine were as real as she and Amal are. This is, of course, perfectly true, as all of them are fictional characters. The layers of fictionality here, oddly, suggest a gesture at a larger truth: the truth that fiction, in the form of the way that we tell the stories of our own lives, is how we all understand our own reality.

“How do I translate ‘tarab’? How do I, without sounding weird or exotic, describe to Isabel that particular emotional, spiritual, even physical condition into which one enters when the soul is penetrated by good Oriental music? A condition so specific that it has a root all to itself: t/r/b.” 

There’s a notable gathering of different flavors of language in this passage. In describing the difficulty of translating “tarab,” Amal juxtaposes this peculiarly local word with a very colloquial Western “weird” and a Victorian “Oriental,” bringing all the book’s worlds together in a few sentences. (The experience of being transported by music is, of course, itself not quite translatable into any language.)

“‘You are not her father.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘I know.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘There are too many coincidences in this thing already. She finds this trunk, you meet her and it turns out you’re cousins. that’s enough, surely?’ ‘What? Bad art? Is that what you’re saying?’ ‘Look. Tell her and do a DNA.’” 

Here, Soueif undercuts her own increasingly convoluted plot. In this exchange between Omar and Amal, she calls out the sequence of coincidences she’s constructed as extremely unlikely. In doing so, she makes a point: sometimes reality truly is strange enough to seem like “bad art” in the retelling—or, to put it idiomatically, truth is stranger than fiction.

“It is not like reading or writing, when you are necessarily cut off from everything so that you may not hear when you are spoken to—indeed you may look up and be surprised to find yourself where you are, so transported were you by what is on the page. When I work at the loom I am still part of things and it seems as if the sounds and the smells and the people coming and going all somehow get into the weave.”

Anna’s comparison between art forms calls into question one traditional metaphor for how we experience stories. If storytelling is not weaving, why not? Anna here seems to suggest that weaving is a craft that involves you more deeply in your surroundings, where reading and writing take you away. As Amal has often observed, that transport can only be made of the things around you, things you already know.

“‘Hubb’ is love, ‘ishq’ is love that entwines two people together, ‘shaghaf’ is love that nests in the chambers of the heart, ‘hayam’ is love that wanders the earth, ‘teeh’ is love in which you lose yourself, ‘walah’ is love that carries sorrow within it, ‘sababah’ is love that exudes from your pores, ‘hawa’ is love that shares its name with ‘air’ and with ‘falling, ‘gharam’ is love that is willing to pay the price.” 

This poetic list of Arabic words for love in Anna’s journal is both suggestive and mysterious. The very idea of this much specificity being bound up in a single word is a little bit alien to English-language sensibilities, as is revealed in the necessity to use multiple words to define each. Each of these translations of love is comprehensible and familiar. However, there is also the sense of a further depth of meaning that this list cannot communicate. 

“Father and grandfather in one—like Rameses or Akhenatun or any one of the great pharaohs. He would not appreciate that. He is a modern man: an Arab-American. And, I tell myself again, he is not her father.” 

Amal’s amusement at the thought that Omar might be both Isabel’s father and the father of her child is couched in historicity. Here, a deeply taboo thought is framed as just another thing that’s happened before: a way of reading the present that’s informed by the distance of the past. Amal’s sense that this idea is ridiculous allows for such a reading; the present might otherwise be too complicated for comfort.

“I dream I am holding on to Sharif Basha al-Baroudi. I kiss his face, his eyes, his shoulders. I lie by him on the great be din my grandmother’s room and I sob with relief at having found him… ‘Thank God you are not my father,’ I say over and over.” 

Amal’s casualness about imagined incest is also inflected by her intense imaginative inhabitation of Anna’s world—and, by extension, Anna’s love for Sharif. In her dream after the imprisonment of the villagers and her brief tryst with Tareq, Amal seems to long not only for the passionate love that Sharif had for Anna, but for Sharif’s principled convictions. He represents both romance and security in a frightening world.

“Here in Tawasi, I reflect on my English life and I find myself wondering if there is some sense in which this, Anna’s Egyptian life, will only be fully real to her once it has been linked with her older one, witnessed by someone she has known and cared for from her earliest days? She never says this, or even hints at it….But she cannot speak her own language, cannot see her own people—and they cannot, or will not, see her. Does this cast a doubt over her life—make it seem provisional? And is this part of the reason why she adopts Egypt’s cause with a more and more relentless fervor?” 

While deep feelings of family and recognition often occur across borders in The Map of Love, national identity and a sense of home are also important. Amal here reflects on how a feeling of a fully lived life might also need to take in some sense of totality. The separation of Anna’s Egyptian life and English life can’t be fully resolved.

“If there are elements of Western Culture in us, they have been absorbed through visiting your countries, learning in your institutions and opening ourselves to your culture. There we have been free to choose those elements that most suited our own history, our traditions and aspirations—that is the legitimate commerce of humanity.” 

Sharif’s writing on the relationship between East and West might serve as an epigraph for one of the major themes of the book. Soueif’s examination of boundary crossing and cultural understanding suggests that part of the beauty of the world is that it can’t and shouldn’t all be reduced to one common understanding. Rather, both the separateness and the connectedness of peoples and places may be honored and delighted in.