The Queue REVIEW
Basma Abdel Aziz’ novel is dystopian fiction, political satire, and a statement of vigorous religious and social dissent. It can at times remind the reader of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (there are multiple characters telling their stories). At times it reminds one of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal (in that it provides political critique with a biting sarcasm). It reminds one of the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Gulag Archipelago (lone author single handedly taking on a totalitarian regime). There are moments when the reader may find themselves referencing the play, Waiting for Godot as people in the queue wait for something that never comes (a responsive government instead of God). I also found myself thinking of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary essay Common Sense (a clear voice demanding that an oppressed people wake up and “do something” to free themselves from tyranny). Lastly, we are reminded of Hanna Arendt’s work on the “banality of evil” as illustrated by the trial of Adolf Eichmann (evil by bureaucratic paper cuts).
In The Queue, A man (Yeya) is shot in the abdomen by security forces during a political protest event called “the shameful event.” His wound requires medical treatment and there is a doctor (Tarek) who understands that the treatment is required but who will not risk his own life and career to perform the surgery until the state has given its blessing to do so. To get permission for his surgery, Yeya joins an ever lengthening queue of people who need something from the government (called “The Gate”). Yeya’s need just happens to be vital to his own survival. He is slowly bleeding to death while he waits. The story introduces us to the various stories of the people in the queue who share his fate or who are not in the queue but are aware of it. The line continues to grow. The door to “The Gate” never opens. And all the while a citizen slowly bleeds to death. Of this government, Basma Aziz writes:
“If it weren’t for the people who’d once entered it and told of all the rooms and offices inside, anyone gazing up at it would have imagined it to be a massive block, solid and impenetrable.”
The line reminded me of a line in Stephen Crane’s short story, the Open Boat.
“When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers. Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: ‘Yes, but I love myself.’ A high cold star on a winter's night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation.”
As the story progresses, the source of the people’s frustration and loss of freedom is progressively unveiled. Granting the State control of the military, the press, communication systems, religion, the economy, the courts, and essential social and health services has rendered the people incapable of resistance to their government’s indifference to them. Demanding what they deserve and are paying for is likely to wind up depriving them of the little they have.
To get services from “The Gate,” citizens need a “certificate of true citizenship” and this is a reward for constant compliance, not a right. Jefferson notes in the Declaration of Independence’s list of grievances that human beings will typically put up with abuses rather than do something about them, until those abuses reach a point of phase transition. This appears to be what Basma Abdel Aziz is trying to inspire. Interestingly, the Bill of Rights may have been added to the Constitution to keep the government from gaining precisely the control of the levers of despotism that we see here (Control of religion, control of the press, control of free speech, control of weapons, control of private information, control of the judicial system, control of assembly, etc.)
As the plot progresses and we learn more about the people caught up in Yeya’s unfolding tragedy, the author continually reminds us of the growing size of the queue. Here are some passages I culled from the entire novel that indicate this swelling population of the neglected.
“The queue grew longer and longer every day, and the space it took up grew ever wider. He noticed that while only a few people left and didn’t return, new waves arrived every day, stretching the queue ever farther.”
“From afar, it [the door to the government office building] looked like a solid wall, and he wondered in despair whether it would ever open.”
“It took a year or two or even more for the Gate of Maladies to begin the paperwork needed to take action, and there were crumbling papers in its old chambers that had been waiting for decades to be finalized. Some, the descendants of the plaintiffs followed up on, while others were kept in trust, never to be discarded, even if no one ever asked about them again.”
“Yehya received an endless stream of news from his new position in the queue, which was no longer at the end, as it had been when he first got there, because dozens more people had since arrived behind him.”
“There was no shortage of reports on when the Gate would open, and this was the greatest source of chaos and contention. People at the end of the queue swapped stories that the Gate had already opened, while those stuck in the middle said they had a week ahead of them at most. Other stubborn rumors, whose provenance no one knew, said that the people standing at the front had heard voices coming from behind the Gate: whole conversations, the rustling of papers, the clatter of cups and spoons. But when these rumors finally reached the people at the front, they said they’d only seen shadows, arriving and departing, but that the gate hadn’t opened and no one had ever actually appeared.”
“People kept arriving at the queue, and the numbers continued to rise, so much so that they would soon block out the sun. But despite how crowded it was, the people in the queue lived their lives and solved their own problems without help from anyone.”
“The queue forked around here and extended ever farther, and no one cared to speculate how long or vast it was anymore.”
“People passed hearsay, a growing number of leaflets, and newspaper articles along the queue; they feverishly searched for fresh information anywhere and any way they could, while time passed and no one moved an inch forward.”
Aziz has described an almost pathological sense of resignation and subservience in the populace of her fictional (but real) society. There are certainly characters who are moving towards resistance (Dr. Tarek) and there are characters who began as rebels but are bullied into compliance (Amani) but as a general rule, the mass of people in the queue are just as stuck in their “queue-ocratic state of mind” as they are stuck in the queue itself.
I thought it might be interesting to examine the citizens of The Queue and their relationship to their government by using the lens of the American Bill of Rights. Citizens of Egypt, in Aziz’s view, have none of these protections. In the society she describes, state sponsored religion participates in the repression of the people.
- In the society she describes, the press and speech is whole subservient to the interests of “the Gate.”
- In the society she describes, assembly in protest is regarded as a national crime.
- In the society she describes all military capability is reserved to the state and its authorized delegates.
- In the society that she describes, citizens have no protection from intrusions into their privacy (either their phone conversations or their medical records).
- In the society she describes, there is no due process. You can be accused, tried, and convicted without any representation. It can happen without you even knowing that you were accused. There is no need for a speedy trial, a trial of your peers, or any trial at all.
- And finally, there is no obstacle to the state’s use of coercive force and even torture.
At the center of the story however, it becomes clear that control has gone beyond what the framers of our own Constitution thought to protect against: the weaponization of the social and health services system that it had not yet even imagined in the 1790’s. Aziz’s Egypt, in her view, has accepted the power of the state to leverage its own healthcare system such that a man bleeding to death from a gunshot wound cannot get treatment without a “certificate of true citizenship.” Tarek, the doctor, is informed that he will “need a special permit if he intended to extract the bullet.”
Note how Aziz describes the pervasiveness of government control over essential services.
“Yehya shook his head in silence. Since the Gate had materialized and insinuated itself into everything, people didn’t know where its affairs ended and their own began.”
“As the ruler faded from the public eye, it was the Gate that increasingly began to regulate procedures, imposing rules and regulations necessary to set various affairs in motion. Then one day the Gate issued an official statement detailing its jurisdiction, which extended over just about everything anyone could think of. Before long, it controlled absolutely everything, and made all procedures, paperwork, authorizations, and permits—even those for eating and drinking—subject to its control.”
Consumer behavior is controlled.
“It imposed costly fees on everything; even window-shopping was now subject to a charge, to be paid for by people out doing errands as well as those simply strolling down the sidewalk. To pay for the cost of printing all the documents it needed, the Gate deducted a portion of everyone’s salary. This way it could ensure a system of the utmost efficiency, capable of implementing its philosophy in full.”
The ability to conduct business is controlled.
“The Gate’s influence had begun to seep into businesses and organizations, onto the streets and into people’s homes.”
Education is controlled.
“He informed the principal that Ines was missing certain forms and that she needed to go to the Gate to obtain a Certificate of True Citizenship.”
Access to essential medication is controlled.
“People who take it say it’s available in public clinics, but you know how it is—they need permission from the Gate to fill your prescription.”
Access to religious services is controlled.
“She visited the High Sheikh, before that too was forbidden—forbidden, at least, without a permit from the Gate—and he told her bad luck followed her because she’d neglected her prayers.”
Access to a telephone is controlled.
“She remembered the notice she’d received from the Gate a year earlier, stating that she wasn’t entitled to a phone line due to misconduct.”
Access to employment is controlled.
“Sabah didn’t have much choice; the discussion was over in seconds. She was just a junior nurse there, young and insignificant, while the man on the other end was extremely senior, in age and position. Senior enough, perhaps, to fire her from this job and any other she might find, senior enough to shut down the entire hospital.”
Access to political representation is controlled.
“Silence gathered around him, as he raised his palms to the sky and called out: “Only those who have gone astray picked pyramid candidates!”
The press is controlled.
“Let’s talk on the way. You’re going to the queue, too, right? Listen, my boss doesn’t want to publish any more reports about the queue. He refused the article I wrote a week ago, and today he turned down another one, and before these two he took everything important out of an article I’d written about my trip to Zephyr Hospital with Amani. Can you believe it, he cut three whole paragraphs down to two and a half lines; it looked like a greeting card when he was done with it! And he even rejected my piece on the Violet Telecom boycott. He threw it down on his desk when he saw the headline, and then refused to give it back to me when I asked him for it.”
Free speech is controlled.
“Meanwhile, rumors spread that some people whose conversations had been recorded had disappeared; they’d been summoned to the basement and never returned.
Access to health care is controlled.
“Permits authorizing the removal of bullets shall not be granted, except to those who prove beyond doubt, and with irrefutable evidence, their full commitment to sound morals and comportment, and to those who are issued an official certificate confirming that they are a righteous citizen, or, at least, a true citizen. Certificates of True Citizenship that do not bear a signature from the Booth and the seal of the Gate shall not be recognized under any circumstances.”
“There was now yet another document to add to the growing stack of papers he needed to qualify for a permit; the road ahead grew longer, more difficult, and ever more complicated.”
“The official had photocopied it twice and told him there was just one more step: a personal interview at the Gate. If he passed this and was granted a Certificate of True Citizenship, it would automatically be added to his file there, along with the rest of his papers and documents. Then, when the Gate opened, they would consider his application for the permit to extract the bullet.”
During the course of the story, Yeya’s friend Amani determines to walk into the hospital and get Yeya’s medical records and x-rays so that he can be treated privately. She is detained and subjected to such reprisals that she finally leaves the building in a traumatized state. It is no wonder that people who are thus marinated in a state of permanent anxiety begin to lose their sense of autonomy. One of Aziz’s characters, Ines, we are told “never imagined she would fall victim to fear like this, having long considered herself one of the most resolute and resilient of people.”
Basma Abdel Aziz’s criticism of Egyptian government has only just begun however. “The most potent weapon in the mind of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” South African dissident, Steven Biko once said. And it is that oppression of the mind and not just the body that Aziz saves some of her most scathing criticism for. Note the way that “The Gate” controls the public’s own internal narrative even when the State’s narrative contradicts the individual citizen’s personal experience.
According to the State, Yeya was never shot.
“Furthermore, the report emphasized that no bullets had been visible on the man’s X-ray.”
He could not have been shot according to the State’s account of the events because no bullets were fired.
“She also told him that the Gate had released a statement claiming that no bullets had been fired at the place and time at which he had been injured. Several prominent journalists published full-page articles concurring that no bullets had been found, neither in the bodies of the dead nor of the injured. Eyewitnesses they quoted insisted that the people who caused the Disgraceful Events were just rioters who had suddenly ‘lost all moral inhibitions’ and flown into a frenzy: first they insulted one another, then they threw stones, and finally they seized iron bars from an old, vacant building belonging to the Gate. Any injuries they sustained were simply puncture wounds they suffered while struggling over the bars they’d wrenched off.”
Had people gone to the hospital? Maybe.
“On the phone, Amani read him a statement in The Truth newspaper made by an anonymous doctor supervising the treatment of the wounded at Zephyr Hospital. The doctor asserted that the high mortality rate was due to the fact that these rioters were simply too sensitive.”
Had anyone been killed in the uprising? No. All who died must have killed themselves.
“Some journalists went even further and published unconfirmed reports that the people who died were not in fact killed but had committed suicide when they saw what had happened. They even claimed that one of them had stabbed several others with an iron stake before turning it upon himself, Japanese seppuku-style.”
What if someone saw it otherwise? Best not to say so.
“He whispered in her ear that to obtain a Treatment Permit, she had to fill out a new application, praising the care her dearly departed daughter had received before her time was up.”
Aziz portrays a society where the people’s narrative of anything has lost all relevance. No one cares what they think happened.
“The results [of the poll] had finally been released, and were precisely the same as the results of the previous poll. Citizens had unanimously endorsed its governance, laws, and court rulings—wholeheartedly and dutifully supporting the just decrees that had recently been issued. Those conducting the poll had therefore decided not to conduct one again. To simplify matters, they would announce the previous poll’s results on a set yearly date.”
Ultimately, any source of information not read from the State-sanctioned script becomes unmentionable and even unthinkable.
“A long time passed, and the Events had nearly faded into memory, when one morning the Gate broadcast a public message, declaring that the square was secure again and open to pedestrians. The Disgraceful Events were over, it said, never to return again, and it urged citizens not to be misled by what they had seen, no matter how confident they were in the accuracy of their vision.”
“After that, the special channel began to broadcast new laws and decrees as the Gate issued them, one after the next, and forbade other channels from showing them. Then it decided to list the names of people whose applications and permits would be approved when the Gate opened, listing them on-screen at the end of every week. This attracted a huge viewership; people delighted in discovering who among them had been lucky and who had been rejected. Later, the Gate issued a decree that forbade other channels from screening any announcements other than its own and forced them to air its broadcasts instead. Its messages had become increasingly aggressive and intense, particularly after the Disgraceful Events, and it made the other channels replay them all. Some networks complied, but others refused and instead shut down their channels and offices. The Gate didn’t regulate radio stations the same way, though. It simply made sure it held sway over employees at the stations, and recruited loyal citizens, men and women alike, to call in to the programs while posing as unbiased listeners.”
In the face of Yeya’s pitiful attempts to save his life, the State remains inflexible. He cannot have a bullet removed if the State’s account of the events say that there were no bullets, right?
“No one was injured by any bullet that day or the day after or on any other day, do you understand? . . . The Disgraceful Events were simply a conspiracy hatched by some cowardly foreigners and a few measly traitors who had orchestrated the Events by planting seeds of discord among people, intentionally trying to divide them.”
Not even video footage could be allowed to complicate the State’s narrative. The Gate explains that such video was the result of a staged foreign movie made to look authentic.
“The countries involved in this joint production wanted it to look as natural as possible, so they kept the cameras and filming equipment hidden from view. The announcement added that it was one of the biggest action films in world history, explaining that this was why a few citizens had believed that there were bullets, tear gas, and smoke, even though there clearly hadn’t been anything like that, nothing except for standard special effects. The Gate called on everyone to remain calm, and avoid being misled by rumors that had been invented and spread by deranged lunatics.”
Clearly, any assertion that Yeya makes to a need for surgery amounts to an insurrection against “The Gate” and the tranquility it has brought to the country. And yet …
“Yehya knew where the bullet moving around in his pelvis came from, he’d seen who shot him, and nothing could deny or change that, not as long as he was still alive.”
Abdel Aziz is not done yet however. It is not simply the body of citizens and the mind of citizens that “The Gate” has fixed to control. It has a plan to subjugate the spirit as well. At numerous points in the novel, the author notes the ways that religious entities and personalities are employed in the service of the wider repression.
Any individual freedoms that citizens may have been left to enjoy can come under attack by religious persecution.
“Someone else quoted a passage from the Greater Book, and although she couldn’t make out what he said, she sensed from his tone that it was directed at her.”
Religion could be used to excommunicate citizens from public commerce and public community.
“The fatwa declared that if anyone insulted religion in any way, boycotting and ignoring them would be not only permissible but also a religious duty.”
“If this woman had any honor, she would know that to obey your Commander was to obey God, and that insubordination was a sin greater than any mortal could bear and would lead to her own demise. But she was probably corrupt, morally and otherwise—no scruples, no religion, not even wearing a respectable headscarf; he could see a strand of hair hanging down beneath that pitiful scrap of fabric on her head. Yes, she was definitely one of the people the Commander had warned him about, just talking to her was dangerous, she might mess with his mind, try to brainwash him.”
Religion could be used to deny people a right to assembly and protest.
“Gathering for any purpose other than to pray and understand religion was hateful, he repeatedly announced; it caused people to lose God’s favor, brought His wrath upon them, and was tantamount to apostasy.”
Religion could be used to instill passivity and docility into citizens and to dissuade them from protesting their own emasculation.
“He had singled her out in group prayers, claiming that the path she’d chosen led to an abyss of corruption, and that she was planting seeds of evil among people by urging them to think, and ask questions, and engage in other such undesirable activities.”
“The High Sheikh invoked a few passages from the Greater Book, explaining that if a believer were to be struck by a bullet (despite his prayers and supplication), his faith would guide him to the understanding that it was God himself who’d struck him down. A wounded believer should not despair or oppose God’s will. Nor should he question the unquestionable—such an act could lead him down a perilous path toward doubt. Instead, the believer must accept the will of God. He must acknowledge how lucky he was to be struck by a bullet, and exalted to a place in heaven ordinarily reserved only for the most dutiful.”
“The remedy to poverty was to bow down and pray and to stop her grousing and complaining.”
Religion could be used to get people to self-censor themselves.
“He added that to question them or gossip about matters of religion—as some fools were doing—was religiously impermissible.”
Religion could be used as a tool of social control over half the population.
“He arose from his seat to distribute an array of small booklets to the women, with titles like The Nature of Women, Torment and Blessing in the Grave, Suffering the Temptation of Women, and Conjugal Rights. He gave Ines the whole collection, saying it was a small gift to welcome her into a sisterhood of repentance and to celebrate her return to the path of guidance and truth.”
Is there anywhere in such a society where a person might take refuge from this pervasive State control? Might one carve out a place where some measure of personal control could be asserted, at least in privacy? Aziz is unsparing on this point. The Gate asserts that it has a “father’s right” to know everything about the citizen’s lives.
“He said it was the right of a father—and those of a father’s rank and position—to watch over his children, using all available means. This could not be considered an infringement of their privacy, he added, and ended his speech by saying that honest citizens had nothing to hide from their guardians.”
No information about a citizen can be declared off limits to the State. Yeya the patient has no privacy that the state needs to consider. Indeed, while the State has full access to his medical records, Yeya does not.
“This document examines the patient’s status after he left the hospital and was no longer under close medical supervision. It aims to create a comprehensive picture of the environment and conditions in which the patient lives and operates, to monitor possible developments (both medical and non-medical), and observe his close friends and acquaintances. Only doctors attending to this case and those with designated official IDs are permitted to examine this file, regardless of their professional specialization.”
Where does all this lead? Basma Abdel Aziz describes a population psychologically beaten down and almost incapable of mounting resistance. “Politics had eaten away at people’s heads until they in turn had begun to devour one another,” she says. Everyone is immobilized by the belief that the Gate is about to open – is about to begin serving people. “Everyone expected the queue to move at any minute, and they wanted to be ready” She says.
“Many people had chosen to abandon their work completely and camp out at the Gate, hoping they might be able to take care of their paperwork that had been delayed there. The new decrees and regulations spared no one.”
No one speaks out.
“How honorable they were not to leave the house when the Disgraceful Events broke out!”
“What laudable principles they had, which had kept them from being swept up in lies or spreading false rumors themselves.”
No one contradicts.
“He [Tarek] knew full well that the visit had something to do with the Gate of the Northern Building. Tarek would have been a fool to think there wouldn’t be consequences if he crossed a man like that, especially in such difficult and uncertain times.”
“It’s impossible to act against the official instructions we receive from the Gate. You both know how it is.”
No one notices what a dystopia they are living in.
“The queue was like a magnet. It drew people toward it, then held them captive as individuals and in their little groups, and it stripped them of everything, even the sense that their previous lives had been stolen from them.”
No one even imagines that things as they are are the result of “The Gate’s” policy.
“Amani would laugh, too—she could never be convinced that the independence she believed she possessed was in truth no more than an accepted illusion, part of a web of relations and contradictions. The Gate itself was an integral part of the system, too, even if from the outside it appeared to pull all the strings.”
Everything as it is, is inevitable. Resistance, where it exists, peeks above the surface of society like a single blade of grass in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
“Standing there in the queue, he toyed with the possibility of freedom; he wanted, even if only in the smallest way, to cast off what he was used to doing so mechanically and to break the tedium of these countless weeks of waiting. He marked his place on the ground, told people nearby that he was leaving, as was customary in the queue, and then decided that for the rest of the day he would no longer do what was expected of him.”
In the midst of all this dystopian gloom, there are two characters who are in transition. The doctor, Tarek and Yeya’s friend Amani. At the beginning of the story, Tarek is cowed by the pressures that have been brought to bear on him not to treat Yeya. “Tarek was a man who didn’t overstep boundaries,” Aziz writes, “a man who’d never been to the Gate, not once in his life.”
“Tarek had never questioned the Gate’s definitive and crushing triumph. But he wasn’t altogether enthusiastic about it, either, particularly given the sorts of injuries he’d attended to in the emergency room.”
Conversely, at the beginning of the story, Amani is unflinchingly devoted to getting Yeya the treatment that he needs come hell or high water. Over the course of the novel, Tarek begins to resist – his good heart overcoming his “good sense.” In the same time frame, Amani is traumatized into subservience.
“Things had happened to her that no one else knew, things she couldn’t speak of, things she still hadn’t admitted even to herself.”
After her incarceration and experience in solitary confinement, Aziz tells us that “she surrendered to the conclusions that she began to weave around the Gate’s message.” She becomes an agent of the tyranny.
“Then she tried to convince Yehya that the bullet that had pierced his side and lodged itself in his pelvis was a fake bullet, that it wasn’t important to remove it, and that he no longer needed to trouble himself with the matter of who had shot him.”
Tarek becomes unable to “pretend as if nothing had happened.” And thus, suddenly, “in a moment of wild rage, he decided to go to the queue in search of Yehya.”
As for Amani, the novel concludes by telling us the following:
“Amani relaxed. She’d found what she’d long hoped for in the Gate’s message—stability and tranquillity—while Yehya kept slowly bleeding.
… But Yehya was not convinced, and he did not stop bleeding.
“Yehya Gad el-Rab Saeed spent one hundred and forty nights of his life in the queue.”
Question for Comment: How does a story like this influence your disposition to grant your government power. Clearly, if it is too weak to abuse you, it may be too weak to serve you. But the converse may also be true. If it is powerful enough to help you, it may be powerful enough to hurt you. This story revolves around the government’s power to grant a medical treatment or deny it. Would you want your government to have that power? Why or why not?
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