The Aswan Dam and Europe in Works by Ingeborg Bachmann, Youssef Chahine, Idris Ali and Anne Michaels

This article offers a transnational comparison of four texts depicting the catastrophic effects of the Aswan Dam on the Nubians. It asks how perspectives of Nubians are represented in relation to the Egyptian national project and to European values and history, particularly the Holocaust and the Second World War. The article also considers how women are figured in relation to cultural loss and European modernity. Its starting point is Ingeborg Bachmann’s unfinished novel, The Book of Franza (1964–1965). Bachmann uses the perspective of a victimised European woman to make far-reaching criticisms of oppressive power practices that the dam represents. However, victimhood is not only linked to the solipsism of a European woman; the novel also posits the Holocaust as the reference point for absolute victimhood. Youssef Chahine’s film, The Nile and Life (1968) presents a diverse Egyptian nation and more radically, shows how Nubians are ignored by the educated Egyptian elite. Although a narrative of hope is established through parallels with the Soviet Union and its modernisation following the ruins of Stalingrad, the film questions whether, rather than hope emerging out of the submerged ruins of Nubia, it is false hope that Nubians have been promised. In Idris Ali’s Dongola: A Novel of Nubia (1993), Nubian characters have a powerful voice, including two forceful women. Their plight is used to launch a scathing critique of Egyptian, Nubian and European attitudes. The only elements escaping Ali’s ironic critique are his commitment to debunking idealising narratives and the importance of keeping history from being submerged. Finally, Ann Michaels’s novel The Winter Vault (2009) conveys something of the scale and grief of the Nubians’ loss. However, it reinscribes both a white, Western woman’s experience of loss and the Holocaust as fundamental reference points for understanding the catastrophic effects of the High Dam.