Mohamed Kheir’s Sleep Phase, beautifully translated by Robin Moger (who also translated Kheir’s story collection, Slipping) brought to mind related neurodivergent conditions that I once wrote about on my mental health blog, Storied Mind. To experience the world as derealized is the feeling that the world around you is not quite real or completely strange while being depersonalized means seeing yourself as apart from the world, looking at it as if it were a presentation on screen. Kheir’s main character Warif blends these states of mind with questions about reality itself after his release from years in prison. We follow him on a powerful journey through political oppression, panic attacks, uncertain memories and a collapsing identity.
The streets of Cairo bear their familiar names, but many of them now look completely different. Where there were once ancient walls or Ottoman era buildings there are now great open green spaces and forests. A once traffic-choked square and transit hub is now a peaceful park. There are foreigners everywhere, who seem to have taken over a great many jobs. At one point, Warif sees a mural that shows a row of blue-suited men “trudging submissively, listlessly, into the distance; by the time the wall ran out they still hadn’t gotten to where they were going.” (page 6). In a way, that image captures the course of Warif’s wanderings in this short novel. Very little happens to him, in terms of external events, and he never reaches any great resolution to his confusion about this changed world he has returned to. But his state of mind pulls us into his sense of estrangement, his dreams, his past friendships, his perception of a changed world and his near madness after seven years in a closet-sized cell.
Through the mass of new sensations and questions about a changed reality, Warif tries to focus on getting back his old job as a translator. He has a series of inconclusive interviews with officials who seem to interrogate him or probe his background rather than give him a conclusive answer about his job. They expect him to do the usual thing and take a pension in return for not working. One of them asks about the social media post he wrote that got him in trouble in the first place. Don’t you find it strange that many of the things you wrote about have actually happened, she asks. But he has little to say and passively takes an appointment for another interview or settles for a non-committal expression of optimism that maybe he will be the exception and be able to return to his job.
The other characters in his life out of prison are his friends, Sally and Wagdi. Sally, his occasional lover, is half European, half Egyptian, and works in banking and finance. That world of numbers contrasts with her wide-open private life. Though raised in Europe, she prefers to live like an Egyptian and mingles with artists and people from every social class. She was attracted to Warif initially through his writing, “the blend of witty satire, the shimmer of his ideas, the well-concealed nihilism that underlay it all.” She is somewhat cynical but well enough connected in this changed world that she can ensure that Warif gets a few meetings about his old job. His disappearance had been a shock to her, but her attachment to him came back when he returned, though it took a while to find the familiar Warif under the numbed surface of his bleak appearance.
Wagdi is a journalist who takes on the full weight of class prejudice. Hailing from a village of cowards, as he thinks, he exudes the hormones of fear that, especially as a kid and young man, led to his bullying by everyone, including neighborhood animals. He is pointed out by the European foreigners and upper class Egyptians and for years endures a low status that leaves him feeling almost invisible. But marriage to Souad and family life with a couple of children help him to settle into a more normal life as a writer of a peculiar kind.
In the repressive world of this Egypt he doesn’t write about current problems but about future events. His job is to map out upcoming stories for the next month or year and write them down for his publication. His job reminded me of reading newspapers, once upon a time, published under the censorship of Middle Eastern regimes, that consisted entirely of press releases of this government leader meeting that foreign dignitary or a conference at which nothing transpires. In such a world, it’s easy to imagine writing “news” stories long before they happen. Warif, despite his difficulty feeling anything following the trauma of prison, is deeply affected when Wagdi seems to disappear not long after his release from prison. Warif seems to be the only one who cares enough to carry out a search for his friend, a search that becomes another journey through a part of the countryside that seems to resemble a landscape of fantasy.
We don’t see a great deal of Warif’s life after prison in this short novel but what we do get penetrates deeply into the mind and even stirs the subconscious in some ways. I found Sleep Phase an unforgettable portrait of a man in limbo, especially as told through the fine translation of Robin Moger. Like Mohamed Kheir’s collection, Slipping, this story changes the way reality appears and holds my interest despite the lack of a complex plot. It is one of those rare books that portrays a wounded mind and soul with intensity and compassion and makes the world look different.
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