“Untitled” © 2025 by Diana Matar, from I Found Myself by Naguib Mahfouz. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
The Arabic word barzakh refers to the liminal space between death and the day of judgment. In his introduction to a new collection of Naguib Mahfouz’s late-career writing on dreams, editor and translator Hisham Matar describes Mahfouz ensconced in a barzakh-like state during the final decade of his life. In 1994, an extremist inspired by the fatwa on Salman Rushdie had stabbed the 82-year-old Nobel laureate in the neck, and the nerve damage incurred made it difficult for Mahfouz to write. When he meets the author soon after, Matar notes that, in contrast to the emphatic style of his prose, Mahfouz himself was incredibly soft-spoken and deliberate in observing his turn to speak in the company of others.
In his barzakh-like new reality of death just barely held at bay, Mahfouz experienced a more intense and evocative dream life. In this period, he was driven to write Dreams During a Period of Convalescence (2004) and the posthumously published The Last Dreams (2025). In gathering still more of Mahfouz’s work on dreams and dreaming in a new collection, I Found Myself … The Last Dreams (New Directions, 2025), Matar further reveals a version of Mahfouz that is vulnerable, nostalgic, and desirous.
Ancient Egyptian and Islamic Egyptian cultures share a fixation on the meaning and interpretation of dreams as portents and prophecies. For Mahfouz, the project of dreaming was also an act of mapping Egyptian identity. Plaguing his dreams are visions of loved ones who have passed, conversations with dead revolutionaries and rulers, anxieties about Egypt’s political present and future, postponed and latent love affairs, and most importantly, phantasmic journeys through the contours of Cairo, a city often made synonymous with Egypt (Masr) itself by those that live on its margins. In one dream, Mahfouz writes:
I found myself walking in the dark, with a ghost moving about me. I was terrified. I took refuge by the statue of Saad Zaghloul. The leader jumped off the pedestal to the ground and woke up the lion that was beside him. It started roaring. And suddenly, the ghost vanished and peace returned to my heart. I thanked the honorable leader and walked across the bridge in peace.
Similarly, Matar’s treatment of these dreams in this new collection is the work of a cartographer: He maps out a Cairo that is constantly slipping through Mahfouz and Matar’s fingers. Matar unearths layers in the Arabic phrase وجدت نفسي (“I found myself”). The phrase, used at the start of each of Mahfouz’s retellings, is traditionally invoked in recounting a dream; the expression also reflects a sense of disorientation or political alienation in a place where one seeks sanctuary or even calls home.
Unlike his novels, which confront his readers with existentialist and political challenges on a sweeping social scale, Mahfouz’s dreams reflect more intimate confrontations in which he is now the protagonist or a bystander. Hovering between the recognizable and the fantastic, these dream encounters often end in profundity by way of question or declaration. Cairo and Alexandria also feature as central figures. In dream 239, Mahfouz writes:
I saw myself reading in my room. Outside, shouts came, slogans in various tongues. I closed the windows and drew the curtains, but then my friends stormed in, saying: We won’t leave until you come with us—the time for solitude has passed.
In his own books, Matar approaches his country of origin, Libya, through a complicated choreography of hope and grief. Describing his father’s disappearance by the Gaddafi regime in his 2016 memoir, The Return, Matar writes:
My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar for him. He is in the past, present and future. Even if I had held his hand, and felt it slacken, as he exhaled his last breath, I would still, I believe, every time I refer to him, pause to search for the right tense.
Matar’s translation of Mahfouz’s dreams reflects a similar entanglement: Translating these dreams, using his knowledge of a city and a landscape that raised him, allows Matar to carve a space of belonging in a city that, for him, represents both exile and refuge.
In I Found Myself … The Last Dreams, Mahfouz’s short vignettes are accompanied by photographs of Cairo in 1994. The photographs were taken by Diana Matar (Hisham Matar’s partner) as part of a collection that was titled, appropriately, Barzakh. Diana Matar’s images ground Mahfouz’s dreams in the lived reality of Cairo at the time—a place increasingly unrecognizable as the same city securitized and made impenetrable in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.
Under the current regime, congregating in or photographing Tahrir Square, a historic as well as political landmark, is no longer permissible. Diana Matar’s photographs of police squads, alone, are inconceivable in the current political climate. Much of Cairo’s upper class has moved east, sequestered from Egyptian public and social life in gated communities owned by private developers and lacking access to public transport.
Even now, the completion of Cairo’s new capital city is underway, signaling another abandonment of Cairo’s historic centers and public life. If the events of the Arab Spring were spurred by the reclamation of urban space, then the opposite might be said of the New Administrative Capital, which journalist Ursula Lindsey describes as a city that “conceives open space as décor for political pageantry, or as a suburban amenity, rather than as a contested public realm.” By moving farther into the desert and away from the center of Cairo, this new capital effectively erases the legacy and potential of a city built on cycles of collective dissent and political transformation.
Mahfouz’s legacy and writings are a testament to Cairo’s rebellious postcolonial political persona and the practices of liberation and world-making that thrive in the midst of political censorship—in particular, reclaiming urban public space and insisting on the freedom of movement and congregation and the quest for self-determination. I Found Myself … The Last Dreams creates a space somewhere above and beyond the carceral structures that dominate the Egyptian sociopolitical landscape. For both Mahfouz and Matar, writing, much like dreaming, is a process of weaving together the remembered past, the imagined future, and the present. Mahfouz’s dreams conjure liberatory geographies for a Cairo that is at once obsolete and unfinished: a Cairo always on the horizon.
Photographs copyright © 2025 by Diana Matar, from I Found Myself by Naguib Mahfouz. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
