Albert Cossery was not a son of the poor.  Or, to put it in the street vernacular of his characters, the "son of a dog."  That's just one of the many epithets they use for each other, constantly, in Arabic translated into French--its closest meaning in English being not the literal "son of a bitch" so much as the much stronger and earthier "motherfucker."

Cossery was born in 1913 in Cairo, the son of a property owner, which made his family of the same class that became the dreaded targets of his later fiction.  He was also of Greek Orthodox and Lebanese descent--a double bourgeois whammy since many of the ruling order in Egypt at the time were of foreign Middle Eastern background.  Egyptians themselves, like in so many colonial zones, were regarded as little more than dirt by the owners and landlords who ruled directly over them.

The class divisions of the pre-Nasser era in Egypt dominate Cossery's writing.  From his first effort, a loosely stitched together group of stories called Men God Forgot, to the posthumously translated A Splendid Conspiracy, Cossery's output over seventy years was meagre and harsh.  Much like the thieves, prostitutes, and unemployed he chose to write about, Cossery was sullen when it came to the prospects for change in his native Egypt.  He left early in life, like so many writers between the wars, for the relative safety and cultural stimulation of Paris where he settled for the rest of his days.  He died in 2008 at the age of 94.

He wrote all of his fiction in French, although he said that he still "thought in Arabic," and in fact his writing shows the unmistakable mark his homeland made upon him.  The dilemmas of his characters, and the superstitions and personal mythologies they suffer under, are all Egyptian to the core.  Only Egypt, with its millenial history of brutal oppression, first by Egyptians, later by outsiders, and later still by Egyptians once again, could have produced an artist who wrote so intimately and so minutely about misery.  His acidic outlook earned him the title from critics of the "Voltaire of the Nile." 

Egyptians themselves have a love-hate relationship with Cossery.  He belonged to that generation who saw the fight against the colonial powers as the final test of Egyptian independence.  Few institutions in Egypt recognise him, even though several leading scholars there have translated and celebrated his work.  Cossery was sanguine about the results of the post-independence governments, and remained dedicated to the poorest of the poor.  But some of his work, written in the days leading up to the last revolution in his homeland, echo events today with an eery prescience.

In one of the stories in Men God Forgot, "The Barber has Killed his Wife," a character is thinking about the future of the country and its people.  A resident of one of the poorest quarters in Cairo, Chaktour the tinker, is trying to connect two seemingly unrelated events, the recent murder of a woman by her husband, an otherwise perfectly sane man, and the revolt by a group of street-sweepers against the government authority that keeps them in an abject state of near-starvation (many of them are too poor to afford shoes).  Chaktour is convinced that the man who killed his family, Saadi, was acting out of desperation, from a life that left him no place to go.  While the street sweepers' battle against police over a few lousy pennies--one of them picks up their supervisor and throws him through a plate-glass window in an upscale shopping district--represents another side of the same profound frustration.  Chaktour explains the link between the two events to a man he meets:

"'I should like to know...'

'What?'

'What the semblance is between Saadi's crime and the sweepers' revolt.'

'Do you think there's some connection between the two things?'

'Not a connection but a similar wish.  A very simple wish, that I feel everywhere around me, but that I cannot identify.  We must be several to do that.  All of us, with our wives and children.  Then it will penetrate into our hearts, it will become terrible and it will grow in us.  And when it becomes immense in us and we can no longer support its presence in our hearts, we too will commit deeds that seem senseless to us today, but which at that moment will be simple and just.'" 

As Cossery's fiction matured over the decades, and it became obvious that there would be no release for Egyptians under their new Egyptian rulers, he turned increasingly in his depictions to subtler and even more controversial methods of resistance.  Even laziness, the withdrawal from society and refusal to work, became a potential way out.  This led some critics to regard Cossery as a relic, a dandy, a "misanthropic old sot."  But he never abandoned those on the lowest rung of Arab society--beggars, the disabled, pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts and those who are just too frustrated, and too imbued with some vaguely defined sense of remaining dignity, to submit to the terrors of a state and a society set on breaking them.

It remains to be seen whether the protestors in the streets of Cairo and other cities in North Africa and the Yemen are willing to recognise this group--all those who do not fit into the reigning, U.S.-supported regimes and the deeply divided societies they foster--and do something about their long enduring misery.  As Slavoj Zizek and others pointed out during the uprising in Iran, it is to these people, the despised, the dispossessed, the "left out," that any real revolution must look.  With the global economic depression squeezing all the regimes in the area, skyrocketing food and fuel prices threaten to drive millions more, who barely maintained some standard of living up to this point, into the shadows where Cossery's characters trudge through a sort of living death. 

This sense of immediate necessity, beyond the false sense always offered by a heartless system of wage and land exploitation, has created a window, a chance to break the spell that has hung over millions upon millions of people for centuries.  But when all the smoke has cleared and all the slogans have died down in Cairo and Tunis and Sana'a, the "left out," the dispossessed, those whom God forgot, will remain.  And the real test of any new order will be met.  Or it won't--once again.

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Quotation from Les hommes oublies de Dieu, translated by Harold Edwards, City Lights Books, 1963