The Disappointed of the Earth

The title of this essay, ‘The Disappointed of the Earth’, alludes to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, and what Fanon (1961) may be said to be preoccupied with in this work is the arrested development of humanism on two broad fronts. Firstly, he is critical of the failure of European humanism with respect to the glaring gap between its ideals of universality and the historical existence of colonial oppression. Secondly, he is critical of the ways in which anti-colonial liberation movements are betrayed by a postcolonial nationalism that shrinks and reduces the wider national struggle to the self-maintaining interests of fast-track elites. In both cases, what is at stake is a situation in which forms of ethnic and class elitism make use of an ideology of inclusiveness without the true social and socialist base for such. Fanon may be said to be radically disappointed with the dehumanizing limitations of both European humanism and African nationalism as they betray their own fundamental or founding tenets.

With these questions of failed inclusiveness as regards the human sociality of labour introduced, I wish now to turn to Alaa Al Aswany's Cairo-based novel, The Yacoubian Building (Al Aswany 2002), with respect to its attention to the psychological and emotional formations of fundamentalist convictions. What I hope to put forward is a theory of chronic disappointment in relation to something I wish to call ‘life abandonment’ as a means of trying to account for some of the conditions leading to the sedimentation of extreme beliefs.

In Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building, we are offered an account of a young man's downfall as he is faced with a chain of events that compel his involvement in political and religious extremism. This young man, called Taha, is the son of a doorkeeper in the Yacoubian building which is situated at the hub of downtown Cairo. In the buzzing, teaming heart of this great city, Taha is able to lead only a shadow life since he is forced to ta