Arabic Booker Shortlist & State Incentive Award
The best description of “Taghreeda El-Bagaa (Chanting of A Swan)” novel for the writer Mekawi Saeed is that it is an award-winning novel; as the it won the State Incentive Award and reached the short list of the “Arab Booker” 2008.The novel addresses the political and social circumstances and developments witnessed by Egypt in the recent years prior to 2011 revolution. This is tackled through “Mostafa”, an editor and poet living in downtown, close to different social categories such as downtown intellectuals, foreigners, street children who suffer from their dislodgment and allure to provide their means of subsistence in any way; accordingly, they return the society insults with extreme violence, rebellion and cruelty. The novel includes many personalities which have intersecting life circumstances. Essam, the fine artist, Mostafa’s friend, loses his “Singaporean” beloved, Samantha, and he tries to fall on his feet by following the Sufi groups; accordingly, the novelist likens him to a swan, saying (I was seeing him like a swan in its last days when it was waiting death and heads to the ocean beach, dancing its last dance and enchants its only sad chanting and then dies). As for the “hero” “Mostafa”, he is always haunted by the memory of the death of his beloved “Hend”, who died after her injury with a gun “shell” kept in a museum as a memory of 1973 war. The novelist, in his presentation of the interference of the Wahabi thought in the Egyptian life, introduces the character of Ahmed El-Helw, who was in his youth a leader of the leftist movement during university, then he traveled to Saudi Arabia, and became extremist. Through joining opposition demonstrations in downtown, Mostafa tries to rise his voice against striking children with bombs in Lebanon and against burning intellectuals in Beni Suef. His American friend “Marcha” shared his company. She wanders in downtime holding her camera to shoot a documentary film on street children phenomena, taking her innocent project as a camouflage of her real objective, which is tarnishing Egypt reputation, according to the novelist’s statement! The novel is eventful and presents many cases. Therefore, it was greatly hailed by critics.
