The Dissenters

The Dissenters, Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha expands the usual subject matter of the 2011 Egyptian revolution to deliver a bold and perplexing story about a Cairene woman's voracious desire for freedom on all fronts.The novel is Rakha's first to be written in English and his first to center a female subject, a sharp departure from his novel The Crocodiles (2013) and its acclaimed sequel Paulo (2016).The Dissenters weaves colloquial Egyptian-Arabic transliterations and French interjections with a robust English lexicon, reflecting the complexity of Egyptian aristocracy at the fringe of modernity.From its opening pages, the novel postures political despotism, sectarian violence, and patriarchy as interlocking systems of oppression in modern Egypt.The novel spans 70 years of Egyptian history and presents a fresh perspective on the all-too-familiar trope of post-Nasser Arab melancholy.In Rakha's narrative, Egypt's history is narrated as the macrocosm of the eventful life of a single Egyptian woman who goes by many names: Amna, a name assigned by a pair of maladroit aristocrat parents; Mouna, a name proscribed by a despondent husband and three children; and Nimo, a nickname used by wayward friends in her youth.The Dissenters illustrates the multitude of roles that Mouna (as the character prefers to be called) undertakes throughout her life: a patronizingly pious matriarch; a secret agent to the Nasserist regime in the 1960s; a feminist and anti-Islamist activist in the 2011 Tahrir Square demonstrations; and a cunning translator and businesswoman -to name only a few.Rakha, however, uses a male narrator, Mouna's middle-aged journalist son, Nour, to tell the larger part of Mouna's -and by extension Egypt's -history.After his mother's death in 2015, Nour frequents the attic of his soon-to-be-sold family home and vicariously experiences the events of Mouna's life through what he calls "attic visions."Via erotic, almost incestuous, hallucinations, Nour rediscovers the mother he and his two younger siblings have long misunderstood.The narrator reminisces, fabulates, and feverishly recounts Mouna's life in letters to his