![]() When Black Magic came out in Arabic two years ago (under the title Sihr Aswad), it earned both popular and critical acclaim and garnered the 2006 Sawiris Foundation Prize in Egyptian Literature. He’s a playwright as well as a novelist and has penned short fiction and nonfiction, too. Gazzar, thirty-seven, was born in Giza and studied philosophy at Cairo University. “It doesn’t express anything other than itself.” Similarly, when Nasir lurches into a relationship, his lust takes on a life of its own, completely divorced from the woman who inspired it. The camera loses interest in reality, writes Gazzar. Just as the camera doubles as Nasir’s tool and alter ego, Black Magic layers a toxic story of sexual depredation over a philosophical treatise on the degradation of meaning and the treachery of images in contemporary visual culture. Nasir’s camera, once innocent and passionate, becomes cynical and depraved. Truth, honesty, and “good-natured artlessness” give way to the cruelty of artifice. Faces, streets, cafes, and marketplaces become “more beautiful, more expansive, cleaner, more radiant, better defined.” But over time, his vision shifts. With his left eye pressed against the lens and his right eye blind to the world, Nasir sees differently than before. When I got that little Yashica just as I stood at the threshold of adolescence, things became mine.” “I fell in love with its coarse black body, infatuated with the feel of it between my hands, and with its large, protruding wide lens…. “I was about fourteen the first time I took a camera in my hands,” he recalls. But for Nasir, the volatile protagonist of Hamdy el-Gazzar’s debut novel, Black Magic, photography is an act of total, relentless possession. Some photojournalists compare it to wielding a weapon. Some street photographers liken taking pictures to kissing. Translated from Arabic by Humphrey Davies
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