The Writer Sweating at His Desk: Labor and Literature in Fatḥī Ghānim’s al-Jabal

Abstract

Abstract Debates about the role of literature in postcolonial Egypt took place within a broader discourse on the mobilization of labor and the creation of a national productive economy. Reading the archive of early issues of the pioneering journal Al-Ghad, this article shows that Egyptian progressive writers in the early 1950s strove to define themselves as workers and literature as a productive endeavor. The article then turns to Fatḥī Ghānim’s 1957 novel al-Jabal, arguing that its depiction of a failed peasant reform project is a means of reflecting on the work of the writer and its productive ends. While nominally committed to a progressive ethos of productivity, the novel remains haunted by the specter of labor with no product, exertion that produces nothing, which endures as an alternative model for literary writing.