Framing the (in)sensible in Egypt’s post-2011 satirical novels in The Queue and Cats of the Eluded Year

Abstract

After Egypt’s 2011 Revolution and the trials and tribulations that led to the re-ascendancy of the old regime to state control, policies of repression intensified to silence dissidents and limit the freedom of cultural expression. The inventiveness of Egyptian novels, however, has not only withstood that authoritarian political temperament, but also managed to perforate its enforced wall of silence, carrying on protest in the cacophonous outcries for change in their artistic expression. This article reads two satirical novels produced in the post-2011 Egyptian context, Basma Abdel Aziz’s al-Tabur, 2013 (The Queue, 2016) and Ibrahim Abdel Meguid’s Qitat al-ᶜam al-faᵓit, 2017 (Cats of the Eluded Year), as examples of the current novelistic undertakings aiming to polemically subvert and destabilize the status quo. Drawing on Mikahil Bakhtin’s conceptions of satire, heteroglossia, and the carnivalesque, the article explores their inventive aesthetics and peculiar combination of seemingly paradoxical literary attitudes, such as realism and fantasy, tragedy and comedy, bluntness and cynicism, as well as the fusion of human heroism and indignation. Providing a survey of Egyptian satire and its correlation with inverting systems of dominance, the article examines these satirical novels as historical forms that respond to pervasive power asymmetries in their postcolonial context.