The Queue

 

The Queue / Basma Abdel Aziz
trans. from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jacquette
NY: Melville House, 2016, c2012.
224 p.

I've been meaning to read this book for a long time, and finally sat down with it this month. It's a story of an Egypt that is run by a centralized authority known as The Gate, and as many centralized authorities are, it's both opaque, intrusive, and completely bureaucratic. 

There has been an uprising only known as the "Disgraceful Events", and people injured during this time are being gaslighted and told that they have no injuries, that nothing happened at all. Yehya is a young man who has a bullet in his abdomen, but isn't allowed to have it removed unless it's at the authorized hospital with all the right papers (all of which is impossible anyhow). The doctor who first treated him, Tarek, is having an existential crisis, not sure whether to defer to the dictates of the Gate, or to defy them and operate anyhow. 

Meanwhile Yehya, his friend Nagy and girlfriend Amani are spending time in the queue, lined up in a crowd literally miles long waiting for the Gate to open so they can get their paperwork for whatever particular need they have. 

The queue is the setting for much of the book -- it's a cross-section of society, different kinds of people in need of different things, but all oppressed under the ever-present surveillance and total lack of care or assistance of the government. There's a religious zealot, a couple of women both drawn to and repelled by him (fearful of everything), an older woman who takes advantage of her position stuck in the queue to open up a little coffee stall and make some money, nurses, teachers, rural residents trying to get land papers, everyone trying to get attestation of their loyalty to the government. 

It's exhausting, ominous, and without any end in sight. Amani, with more self-confidence and initiative than many, tries to bluff her way into the official hospital to retrieve the x-ray that Yehya needs herself, but it doesn't go well -- she is arrested, and her harrowing experience changes her. She becomes as fearful and cowed as everyone else, and starts to believe the government propaganda that says no-one was hurt, that her beloved's injuries, which she herself has been advocating for help for, really don't exist, aren't really as bad as he thinks. It's the most chilling part of the book for me. 

It's a study of authoritarianism -- the control over daily life and the tiniest parts of personal existence, the mind control and propaganda, the lack of care for anyone, even the brainwashed supporters of its authority. Sounds all too familiar over the last few years. 

This book reminded me in some ways of both Vladimir Sorokin's The Queue and Olga Grushin's The Line, both examinations the Soviet life and the blankness of government and access to goods. In this book, the lack of access is to the very proof of life - the forms required to live in a world run by the Gate, and denied by the Gate. The hopelessness is palpable. 

This was a powerful read, and the last few pages need to be read again in order to make your mind up about what happened. The conclusion changes the way I read the book, and I had to think over it again in light of the final pages. Quite a book!