Why Did the Jumpers Leap? On ‘The Dissenters’ – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY
Why Did the Jumpers Leap?
On Youssef Rakha’s The Dissenters
By Abdelrahman ElGendy
Once, on an unassuming Cairo afternoon in January 2011, an Egyptian generation was touched by a dream that would become its curse. Across the span of 70 years, Youssef Rakha’s The Dissenters traces the fissures leading up to, and the aftermath of, the Tahrir revolution in Egypt: the ragged edges where a country cracked, and the light blue mornings when it teetered on the cusp of becoming.
The novel unfolds through a series of letters between its main narrator, Nour, and his sister. After their mother, Amna, dies in 2015, Nour retreats to the attic of their home, where he experiences vivid visions of her at various stages of her life: as a young woman in an arranged marriage in the 1950s, a flirtatious French student, a self-reliant divorcee and lover, a devout mother, and finally, an activist during the Arab Spring. These revelations compel Nour to write fervent letters to his estranged sister, Shimo, trying to bridge their understanding of the enigmatic woman they thought they knew.
In The Dissenters, the personal, societal, political, and historical dance, disentangle, then re-collide. Within this flux, we study through a close dissection the forces that shaped Amna into Mouna and then into Nimo. The violent mutilation of her body in her village, done in the name of honor, Sharaf, undoes her first version of herself. Amna then rebels and shakes off Sharaf, escaping into the arms of her socialist lover, Amin. She incites both the wrath and fear of her family and village, as she shows them something they’d rather never have to see. She shows them what she thinks of them—what they are. And it terrifies them. Before long, Socialism threw her beloved behind bars, and his political incarceration cut the second version of her life short, depriving her of being Mouna just as soon as she inhabited the name.
One of the most enticing aspects of The Dissenters is its treatment of time. The book eschews a traditional linear narrative, opting instead for spiraling temporal cycles. It orbits around three distinct timelines: Egypt’s fifties and Amna’s nascent years, the tumult of the January 2011 revolution and its wake, and the reflective period following Amna’s death in 2015, when her son Nour writes letters to his sister Shimo in the secluded attic. With each orbit, the timelines continue to reach toward one another as the story departs and returns. Each cycle peels back layers, invites recognition, or complicates inquiries. Rakha crafts the novel with a deftly controlled chaos, and the story emerges like a scatter of pixels gradually coming into sharper focus.
As each stage of Amna, Mouna, and Nimo unravel, Rakha sketches the broad class spectrum of the Egyptian society. Amna and her peers, with their French-tinged Arabic, embody the remnants of a post-colonial era when French-oriented education, culture, and language distinguished Egypt’s aristocracy and intellectual elite. Semsem, Amna’s best friend who nicknamed her Nimo, comes from Shoubra, a rough neighborhood dominated by baltagis. Throughout the book, Rakha repurposes the class lens to frame the political and historical. Nasser, for instance, becomes an uber-baltagi who epitomizes the daunting leadership figure in the Egyptian neighborhood, equally feared and revered.
Then one night in 2011, the world cracks open in Tahrir Square: Mubarak steps down—and Amna and the people of Egypt believe in miracles anew. Sharaf, Socialism, Dignity; they all part to allow for a revived concept to enter: Revolution.
The Dissenters—like much post-Arab Spring literature—borrows and subverts prophetic language of folktales and holy scriptures to paint the revolution, its seeds, and its residue. In symbolism reminiscent of Naguib Mahfouz’s masterpiece, Awlad Haretna, Amna Wahib Abu Zahra echoes the name of the prophet’s mother, Amina Bint Wahab from the Bany Zahra tribe, while the leftist, persecuted husband Amin Abdallah bears the honorific title of the prophet himself and his last name. We read about the mysterious scar on Amin’s back that instantly recalls the Prophet Mohamed’s Seal of Prophethood —the shape and size of a strawberry, the color of aubergine, a many-hued darkness gleaming, with three ashen points marking the edges.
The January 2011 revolution breathes life into Amna, sweeping away her apathy and cynicism as she transforms into a dissident, possessed by the revolutionary spirit. Yet, across Egypt, women were jumping to their deaths from balconies, rooftops, and into abysses. As defeats pummel the revolutionaries, these unconnected women all over the country become the central obsession of Amna: Why did The Jumpers leap?
Amna scours the news, collecting snippets and data, constructing a case, and theorizing that The Jumpers were a direct byproduct of the revolution. Her desperate hunt to connect the dots that refuse to be connected evoke Egypt’s post-Arab Spring sense of loss. Amna and Egypt collapse into one. Amna not only bears the burden of a country’s history; she becomes a fractal of our country, her biography a variation on its history, a version of the same story.
The novel essentially poses the question of what it means to repeatedly find oneself asking, “How did I get here?” yet always fail to find an answer? What futile quests might this perpetual grief set one on? The narration’s recursive nature mirrors Egypt’s own curse to repeat the same mistakes—as Egyptians say, to eat khara with a spoon. To watch again as an officer delivers sentimental speeches and sham elections are held to make him a leader for life.
The Dissenters is an English novel in which Arabic pulsates beneath every letter. Cairo’s streets, which lie at the heart of Rakha’s work, can be tasted on every page: the slurping of halabessa on Qasr ElNil bridge, the ring of chants in Tahrir Square, the khara, behims, baltagis, and magnoonas—wherever the reader looks, the language thrums, alive.
Erotica in The Dissenters—whether pertaining to Amna or Cairo, who often merge into one—juxtaposes lightness with heft, and sex with violence; allure and revulsion arrive as twins. Rakha not only masterfully renders the erotic at the scene level but also, as a provocateur of sentences, turns each phrase and syntactical sway into an act of seduction.
Rakha’s The Dissenters swoons, caresses, jabs, and—once the last page turns—haunts. A novel for anyone who knows what it means to have believed in something. A partner, a revolution, a god. To have believed and then ended up naked and bruised by the wayside.
Abdelrahman ElGendy is an Egyptian writer and translator from Cairo. He is the author of HUNA, a memoir exploring the politics of dissent and erasure through the lens of his six-year political incarceration in Egypt, forthcoming from Hogarth, Penguin Random House. ElGendy’s work appears in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Nation, Guernica, and elsewhere. His poetry and prose translations from Arabic appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Literary Hub, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. The winner of the 2024 Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award, ElGendy is a 2024-25 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University.
