Summary

Crocodiles is between a literary essay and a bitter coming of age novel. Taking the Egyptian Carienese society as a topic, Rakha undertakes its intellectual archeology. Identifying three main strata, he explains the contemporary Egyptian revolution lead by the generation of the 2010, by links with his own 1990’s generation, and the previous one of the 1970’s. Each animated with different ideologies, they are nevertheless all motivated by a unique quest for meaning.

On June 20th 1997, the famous 1970’s social and communist activist, Radwa Aadel, commits suicide. On that day, Nayf, a young poet, celebrates his 21st birthday, and the creation of The crocodiles, a secret poetry society. These unrelated events are however in some way milestones that led to the Egyptian revolution. Radwa’s suicide, Youssef the narrator asserts, gave meaning to words like Nation, People, Revolution, chanted by the youth who took the streets some fifteen years later in 2011. In 2011, these words had a meaning again, even if for a very short while. The madness and recklessness that drives the 2010 generation who toppled the Mubarak regime, is no other than that of Radwa’s, or of Nayf’s in the 1990’s.

Nayf creates the Crocodiles along with the narrator Youssef, and a third friend called Paolo. Apart from a common love of poetry and admiration for the Beat generation, The crocodiles are young men in their early twenties looking for authenticity and total freedom, despising the mercantile values of society. Those were years of unbounded excesses in sex, drugs, and alcohol. But they are also strangely refreshing times, to which the narrator looks back with a mixture of irony and nostalgia. Youssef thinks back to the story of his friendship with Nayf and Paolo, a bond that formed naturally, as if the world had brought them together. But it didn’t survive their growing up. Neither did their wild dreams of a different world. And the uprising, eagerly desired by the crocodiles in the 1990’s, today passes them by.

The novel is a patchwork of reflections and memories, more logically than chronologically connected. The narration however does follow one chronology, the one that culminates in Nayf’s tragic death. Although an accident, Nayf’s death has the after taste of a suicide. As if dreamers were bound to die, burnt by their own visions, like Radwa Aadel was.
It is indeed hard to tell what killed Nayf in 2001. Objectively it was a car accident. But Nayf’s insanity had been increasingly difficult to control in the few months preceding his death. Obsessively in love with a young woman nick-named Moon, he was on his way to confront her in her house, where he suspected she was with another man. A great admirer of the American poet Allen Ginsberg, Nayf spends several years translating his poem “The Lion for real” into Arabic. Until the poem slowly becomes reality, and Nayf finally hallucinates the presence of the lion in his living room, like Ginsberg before him. Nayf is scared of how real the hallucination is, and of how psychotic he seems to have become. He is also scared of the increasingly threatening presence of the lion, with him in the car the day he died. A metaphor of this mixture of energy, recklessness and insanity that give people the power to change the world, the lion is both indispensable and dangerous.

This modern, quite unique and powerful, novel features both a poetic voice (sometimes literary, sometimes slang-like) and great conceptual precision. Correspondingly, the story oscillates between the captivating transformations of three friends in their early twenties, and the analysis of the Egyptian society.

The book, which stands on its own, is part of a trilogy. The next volume is entitled “The lion was right”.