In My Library — Thick Lips

“In this section we review all works presented to the library of ‘The Woman's Voice.’”

I am sorry that the special issue which “The Woman's Voice” brought out for Christmas and the New Year prevented me from reviewing for you, Madam, some of the books that have been presented to my library. In my library this time are new works worthy to be counted among the books you read and with which you adorn your desk. The first of these works is “Thick Lips” by Mr. Mahmoud Taymour. Number of pages: 126. Publisher: al-Istiqama Press, Cairo.

Readers of fiction in the Arab countries have known Mahmoud Taymour as a masterly storyteller and a novelist of the first order, whose like our modern Arabic literature has not met. This is a truth known to everyone who has followed Taymour in his various works of fiction. He has written some twenty-five books of stories which count, rightly, as a vast literary fortune in our modern Arabic letters.

This collection is made up of several short stories, among them: The Stray Kiss, The Milaya of Love, Rulers from Heaven, The Saint of God, Asaad Bey's Dog, The Kiss on the Leg, Abu Ali and the Bottle of Cognac, The Fifth Column, The Substitute, and Thick Lips — the most important of them, in my view, and the crown of the whole collection.

Space does not allow a criticism of these tales tale by tale and a display of the points of beauty in them, but I must draw the readers' attention to the story “Thick Lips,” for in it appears the greatest of Taymour's storytelling merits: precise sensory description. So that the reader may glimpse something of this description, I content myself with citing a few of the author's phrases in describing the lips of the story's heroine.

Hear him say, on the tongue of the story's hero, after he had come upon the owner of the lips in one of the banks, where she bumped into him twice, and he meant to protest at her behavior but found himself walking beside her in the same direction:

“And I found myself walking with her in one direction along the road. She was a brunette with a certain comeliness, wearing a modest dress whose look did not bespeak easy means, though it kept a shade of elegance and sound taste... Nothing set her apart from her likes, whom the passer-by meets of a morning and an evening, save one particular feature: her lips!.. Yes, her lips — the very crux of her... They were two thick lips which I never saw closed for a moment, but forever parted, allowing a white gleam of teeth to show forth its sparkle and its symmetry... And when you look at the upper lip, you notice at once that it seems always to be trying to draw itself away from its companion in pride and disdain; and this disdain and pride have gathered themselves into a protrusion at its center — a protrusion resembling, in many respects, the nipple of a breast, attracting you by its artistic formation and compelling you to gaze at it without end...”

“And each of us looked at the other; then we let ourselves go in a ‘loud’ burst of laughter, during which I found myself gazing at her two thick lips as they clashed and jostled, and watching with eager delight that lovely protrusion, until I wished her laugh might last a while longer...”

Their talk ran on, and he began conversing with her “his eyes never leaving her lips.” And the owner of the thick lips was nothing but a thief, who robbed him of his wallet and left him alone in the café. Yet in spite of that he could not — when his eye fell, in a magazine holding a contest for lips, upon a “thick” mouth with parted lips, a noticeable protrusion in the middle of the upper one — help cutting out the picture of that mouth and putting it in a dictionary on his desk. And often he found himself driven, in spite of himself, to open the dictionary and gaze long at those thick lips — those lips which he did not scruple to describe with the ugliest epithets and the coarsest terms: “Your lips?... Ha! Ha!... Your thick, swollen lips, drooping like the lips of the ugliest Negroes...?”

As for these lips, and their effect on our friend the lawyer, the hero of the tale, and the end to which they brought him — of that, Madam, I shall tell you nothing, for fear of robbing you of the pleasure of reading it complete in the book. And the book holds a number of tales that deserve to be read with pleasure and eagerness.

In my library, Madam, is another handsome book by Mr. Taymour: “Eternal Eve,” a play whose two protagonists, Antara and Abla, are two great figures out of ancient Arab history. In this play the author has not followed the familiar historical course of the story of Antara and Abla, nor has he bound himself to the facts which the historical sources give of these two heroes; rather he has drawn Abla for us as a modern girl — gay, seductive, alluring — who tries, despite all the love and admiration she harbors for her beloved Antara, to show him the opposite of what she hides within.

She is a lover of fame: she never ceases to demand that her name “fill the world and occupy mankind.” And she feigns love for the Emir Umara, Antara's adversary and his rival for the heart of his beloved — and that only to deepen the vexation of this beloved. And she toys with the hearts of young men, although she has reached the age of marriage, and despite her intense admiration for that dark young man. When Hind, one of her companions, accuses her of contending with their friend Daja' for the heart of the Emir Umara, Abla answers her: “I have robbed no one and contended with no one!... It was Antara who came to me,”

“and the Emir who pays court to me. What, then, was I to do?”

She does all this while refusing to admit, in the depths of her soul, that her heart hangs upon the love of Antara. She is woman, Madam — the woman who delights in being always the subject of talk, of love, and of dalliance; the woman who wants all people to love her, and all men to be infatuated with her, and heroes and knights to loiter at her feet. These are some of Abla's traits in the book Eternal Eve.

And would that she stopped at this point; then the matter would be light. But she brought calamity upon her tribe in the dearest of its sons, to feed her reckless vanity and to slake her rancor. And she throws Antara's love to the winds, for in her eyes he is no more than “a drum she beats so that it resounds with her name; and if the drum is torn, she hurries off in search of a new drum!”

Poor “drum” — none of these childish games was hidden from him; but man, Madam, is man, in every time and in every place. So he is, at least, in Taymour's eyes.

And the play reaches its peak when Abla becomes betrothed to Umara to spite Antara — she who loves him, and wishes from the bottom of her heart that he would confess his love to her. Even so, she seizes the chance of her betrothed Umara's absence and meets with Antara, having contrived that meeting in a thousand and one ways. Umara surprises them as they dance together; Abla excuses herself with all ease and all simplicity, as if nothing had happened, then throws her head upon Umara's breast — and Antara goes off to the field of war in fury... As for her, she returns to the dancing and the singing, and goes wild, saying of this:

“He drives me mad... he drives me mad” — meaning Antara. Antara loves Abla, Madam; and yet, despite her knowledge of his love and her certainty of it, she leaves him to wander distraught, to gratify her recklessness and her vanity.

For heaven's sake, Madam, do read “Eternal Eve” and give your opinion of it!