YUSIF IDRIS (1927-1991) Egyptian author of novels, short stories and plays, Idris became a physician in the early 1950s, was imprisoned in 1955, witnessed and wrote about some of the most tumultuous years in Egypt’s history – including the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
In that same year Idris gave up his medical career to accept an administrative post in Egypt’s Ministry of Culture. He was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, in part, perhaps, because of his ability to describe surreal situations with a detached surgeon’s eye.
In his short story “The Aorta”, the main character is a petty thief who claims the government removed his aorta on the bizarre ground that the organ hosted a disease that threatened to infect all Egyptians. The crowd who captures him will have none of his absurd lie and strip him in a butcher’s shop to see for themselves. It is a cautionary tale of mob mentality: how people who seek to justify anger and revenge may mutilate their own humanity in the process.
EXCERPT FROM “THE AORTA”
There was no direct agreement, no words spoken, just an all-encompassing eagerness that aroused and engrossed us: we were excited, enjoying ourselves as though now quite certain we had discovered our goal… It was there in that sinner, still carrying with him the sin he had committed. He had to get his just deserts. We would gratify all the goodness in us by punishing him, by seeing justice done. And we would gratify all the evil in us by applying justice ourselves, with our own hands, by giving evil a completely free rein, by causing pain and hurt under the guise of proper retribution.
(Mikel Dunham)