Ra'ouf Mus'ad

Ra’ouf Mus'ad (sometimes known as Raouf Moussad-Basta) is an Arab playwright, journalist and novelist who was born in Sudan to Egyptian parents, moved to Egypt as a teenager and has lived in various countries, both in the Arab world and in Europe, during the past 30 years. He has now settled in Amsterdam with his Dutch wife and their children and has taken Dutch nationality.

He comes from a Coptic Christian background, although his father converted from the Orthodox Coptic Church to Protestantism and became a Protestant minister. This religious, and more specifically Christian, background is an important part of the struggle with identity and belonging which becomes apparent in much of Mus'ad’s writing.

He was born in Port Sudan in 1937 and lived the first years of his life there, before moving with his family to Wad Madani, to the south east of Khartoum on the Blue Nile. From here he was sent to boarding school in Asyut in Middle Egypt, from where he returned to Wad Madani for the summer holidays before his father’s work prompted the family to finally relocate to Asyut. He studied journalism at the University of Cairo and graduated in 1960. It was in Cairo in 1954 that he first joined a small underground Marxist organisation intitially called ‘The Vanguard of the Workers and Fellaheen’ and then later renamed ‘The Party of the Workers and Fellaheen’.

In Cairo the family moved around various areas, including al-Fajjala and Deir al-Malaak, in increasing poverty because his father had fallen seriously ill and could no longer work.

In Nasser’s Egypt Communist organisations were illegal and political activity was a dangerous pursuit punished with imprisonment. During the Suez Crisis of 1956 Mus'ad was arrested whilst handing out leaflets urging popular resistance to the foreign occupation of the Canal Zone. He and his comrades were held for one night and then released. In December of 1960 he was again arrested at the family flat in Deir al-Malaak after a naïve attempt to escape and disappear. He was held for seven months before being brought before a military court in Alexandria and sentenced. He spent another seven or eight months in custody in Alexandria before being moved to the oases prisons where he stayed until the mass releases of 1964. It was in prison that he met and made friends with the writers Sunallah Ibrahim and Kamal al-Qalash, with whom he co-authored his first book.

After his release, in 1964, he started to work as a journalist and began his literary work: plays, stories and reportage. In 1970 he moved to Warsaw, where he studied theatrical production and got married.

He lived in Poland for five years, during which time he visited many Soviet Block countries. This was the start of a long period of self-imposed exile which saw him establish himself in Baghdad and Beirut before returning briefly to Egypt. In Baghdad he worked in the Cinema and Theatre Foundation and met the woman who would become his next wife. In Lebanon he worked as a journalist for the newspaper as-Safir, and lived in Beirut through the Israeli siege of 1982, which is what eventually forced him to leave Beirut and return to Egypt.

He moved to the Netherlands in 1990, where he has lived and worked since. He has, in his own words, ‘attained a certain amount of fame’ and has been active in the media, contributing to cultural and political debates, such as the consequences of the war in Iraq and taking part in a televised debate on censorship alongside the celebrated Arab poets Mahmoud Darwish and Adunis.

In 2004 he set established a small publishing house, in collaboration with a number of other Arab writers living outside the Arab world. Named ‘Muhajiroun’, the publisher is intended to print the works of Arab writers free from the difficulties of publishing in the Arab world, which Mus'ad sees as being beset by problems engendered by ‘the state of decline in the Arab political scene’.

Below is a list of Mus'ad's published works:

• إنسان السد العالي / The People of the High Dam (with Sunallah Ibrahim and Kamal al-Qalash), Cairo: Dar al-Katib al-Arabi, 1967

• يا ليل يا عين / O Night, O Eyes, Cairo: Ministry of Culture, 1970

• لومومبا والنفق مسرحيتين / Lumumba and The Tunnel – Two Plays, Cairo: al-Hay’a al-caama lil-ta’lif wa-l-nashr, 1970

• صباح الخير يا وطن: شهادة من بيروت المحاصرة / Good Morning Homeland: A Testament from Beirut Under Siege, Cairo: Matbu'at al-Qahira, 1983

• بيضة النعامة / Ostrich Egg, London: Riad el-Rais Books, 1994

• مزاج التماسيح / Crocodile Mood, Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 2000

• في انتظار المخلص: رحلة إلى الأرض المحرمة / Waiting for the Saviour: A Journey to the Holy Land, Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 2000

A number of his mature works are either out of print, awaiting reprint or yet to be published at all. Below are those for which details are available.

• غواية الوصال / The Temptation of Being Together • صانعة المطر / The Rainmaker

• السودان: ستون عاما من الحنين / Sudan: Sixty Years of Longing

• سجون أبي / My Father’s Prisons. (With his daughter Yara)

His novel 'Ostrich Egg' has been translated into Spanish, French and Italian:

• Spanish El Huevo del Avestruz, Raúf M. Basta. Translated by Salvador Peña Martín. Guadarrama: Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo. Memorias del Mediterráneo) 1997

• French L'Oeuf de l'autruche, Raouf Moussad-Basta. Translated by Yves Gonzalez-Quijano. Arles: Actes Sud. (Mémoires de la Méditerranée) 1997

• Italian L'uovo di struzzo : memorie erotiche, Ra'uf Mus'ad Basta. Translated by Wasim Dahmash and Angelo Arioli. Rome: Jouvence. (Memorie del Mediterraneo) 1998

The foremost authority on Ra'ouf Mus'ad is Peter Terence John Munford, a much under appreciated academic at the University of Durham.