I almost claim that the art of autobiography in Arabic literature has been greatly wronged by its writers, who have taken it out of the framework of history, documentation, and written confession, into the space of beautifying the writing selves, improving faded images, and even inventing fake histories that rely on ignorance of the roots of the owners of these biographies.

The works excluded from these beautifying powders were nothing but victims of another injustice; which is neglecting them, attacking their owners, or diminishing their value. The few published biographies have remained captive to these two trends; the spears of forgery or the arrows of attack.

We have seen how the great creators of the East, in our Arabic language, distance themselves from written frankness, for revelations - which may destroy countries - can establish a rift between individuals, and the absence of interests. 

Only a few in our literary and artistic history have been able to write an autobiography, such as Taha Hussein, Louis Awad, Mahmoud Bayram Al-Tunisi, and Youssef Wahbi... 

Finding an unknown biography of an exceptional personality that records every detail requires one of two things: Either the historical discovery of that biography, in a treasure chest, or a drawer of secrets, or finding a novelist researcher, who has enough courage to be the owner of that chest, just as he has enough imagination to send to accompany that character since birth, so he is closer to her than the jugular vein, to represent her personality in body and soul, and even seeps into her depths to know the personality’s secrets, and the convolutions of her brain rest on him to read her thoughts, so he does not narrate as a witness, but rather conveys to us in the tongue of the character what transcends the times to reach us in a poetic narrative language, whose classical eloquence is not tainted except by the eloquent colloquial.

This was the state of affairs when I started reading the work of the novelist Mohamed Baraka (The Lady’s Tavern), and I deliberately did not read the impression of many about the novel, and their readings of it, so that I would have room to contemplate it, searching for what Baraka presented in this work, not only as a fictional reality, but as a technique, language, and cognitive world. These are the elements that take us from the fact that the test of (The Lady's Tavern) is a work of autobiography, to be in front of a high-end literary novel. 

If the key for many contemporary novelists is to find a novel manuscript to re-present to the reader, after intersecting with its events, Baraka has surpassed this cinematic dilemma to take us to the owner of the manuscript, to tell the events in her own tongue, the conversation of the companion to the fellow, in whom she saw what we described of courage and imagination, to dedicate to him alone her rare and captivating story that no one had heard in full before him.

The Lady, in Arabic “El Sit”, is referred to the iconic Egyptian Singer in the Arab World, Umm Kulthum, and the legendary voice for more than a century.  

As if I hear in the opening of the novel (The Lady's Tavern) her voice singing in Ahmed Rami's translation of Al Khayyam’s Quatrains: "I heard a voice calling at dawn, calling from the melodies: Sleeping people, rise and fill the cup of gold before the cup of life is filled with the palm of fate." Coming to give her writing hand; the novelist Mohamed Baraka, the essence of her stories and the fragrance of her positions, the impact of drops of anger and deprivation, jealousy and revenge, in addition to the game of the lady, as she collides inside her distant secret cave, to determine the space of the margin and the horizons of the text, the magic of the introduction and the melancholy of the conclusion. 

Baraka conveys to us, with the inspiration and inspiration of Umm Kulthum and her revelation, several different worlds; the world of the village that knew her childhood, and the world of Cairo that witnessed her maturity, then the world of the entire planet that she became its planet! (Kawkab Al Sharq – the Arabic nickname of Umm Kulthum is the Planet of the East). The shift that Thouma (Another popular nickname), as her mother calls her, or Umm Kulthum as her father named her, made in the life of her small family and her village, and her surroundings, was enough for us to know that those small miracles that she achieved are like pieces of mosaic, which form a larger picture, based on not recognizing the impossible. And since The Lady we know, we realize her power over those around her, there is no harm in responding to the fictional stories of her childhood, so we believe them, to realize that behind that power is the malice of a stubborn child, who used to get what She wants, sometimes with tears as a weapon, and other times with small conspiracies.

The stories dictated by Baraka delve into the misery that a child knew, as is evident in her story about collecting dung: “Animal dung was my first profession in life and my feminine skill on the path of wrestling the bull of poverty and avoiding the blows of its deadly horns. I cling to the edges of my mother’s black dress like a lost sheep on the rural road. We encounter a foul-smelling treasure and her face lights up. I turn my face away and she scolds me with her eyes. My fingers – which were created only to browse musical notes – sink into the warm cow and buffalo dung like a freshly dead corpse. My mother smiles and praises me: “Clever, Thouma.” A fleeting word of encouragement, but it unleashes a terrifying energy inside me as I transfer the dung to an old rusty tray. A farmer approaches us from afar, driving his cart, whipping his donkey's back. My mother quickly hides her face behind her black veil, gasping in shock: "Shame on you." It is not appropriate for anyone to see her in this situation, for she is, first and last, Fatima Al-Maliji, a woman of noble origins, descended from the noble family whose lineage goes back to Imam Hussein, the grandson of the best of people. We return home with a valuable catch, we make dung into discs and then leave them to dry, so they become ideal fuel for the baking oven and cooking stove.”

I have only prolonged this quoted scene to tell you that it is a sample of the carefully drawn details that fill (The Lady’s Tavern), details that are aware of history and geography, as if we are facing a parallel sociological reading of the events that we have known a part of, and now we read the hidden between the lines, revealing and explaining.

(Al-Sit) will respond to other histories that she presented to public life, dictating to Baraka, “Joy is the blue end of the spectrum, I catch it every morning on my trip to the writers’ headquarters, the situation was not as tragic as it was depicted in a TV series with my name, it is not true that we used to sit on the ground like chicks in the winter; We had wooden chairs, each of which we called (takhta), a desk in Arabic".

Of course, Umm Kulthum did not follow the episodes of the series in her paradise, which was broadcast many years after her death, but we will discover from time to time the existence of two imaginations; Baraka's imagination, which presents such corrections, and Thouma's imagination, which presents unfamiliar judgments, descriptions and events: 

"For the first time I will see Cairo, the city whose blood is divided between different races and nationalities, embracing all strangers on condition that none of them climb into her bed after being intoxicated by the hospitality of the whole night. The beauty confused between the yashmak (a face cover to show persuasive women) and the bare legs, between the harim (the feminine corner) and the casino, between the dawn supplications in Al-Azhar Mosque and the clink of champagne in the "One Thousand and One Nights" club. The city of regret and sins." The orphan series that bears her name again, when she summons her first love, Lulu as she calls him in the novel, or Sheikh Abu Al-Ela, and the story of her love affair with him is suitable for a series in its own right: 

"I deny love, so I wear the mask of a schoolgirl and hide in my sleeve the breath of a girl in love. No one has ever told you that he is only twenty years older than me, and with this mixture of hot masculinity, a twisted mustache, and black eyes, our meeting in bed becomes a poem written by the sky. The real "meeting of the clouds" that I have always longed for, and not my collaboration with a bald, weak-sighted composer whom they metaphorically call "the musician of generations." Thus, with a single stroke of imagination, Thouma eliminates Abdel Wahab, in a comparison that he loses to "Lulu." Is this the cruel imagination of the Lady, or is it the even more cruel imagination of Baraka? 

In a listening session at her father's house, she says, about the presence of the Sheikh:

"And when I reached the end of the poem, I was surprised by him singing it with me as if we were in front of the notary public performing the marriage contract ceremony:

If you are serious or you happen, you are the one who is desired And I have no one but you who is beautiful and loved."

Then she refers to her pride in the name of Miss Umm Kulthum, which the Sheikh called her by, and in the poem he requested, as if he was asking for her hand: I see you are resistant to tears, which prompted her, as Baraka says on the tongue of Thouma:

"Now you know why I sang that particular poem three times; in 1926, composed by Abdo Al-Hamouli in the Bayati scale, in 1944, composed by Sheikh Zakaria Ahmed in the Sika scale, and in 1964, composed by Riyad Al-Sunbati in the Kurd scale. It is not just one of the best examples of Arabic love poetry written by a military commander known for his bravery in challenging the Romans. The poem acquired a very special meaning for me, and became a memory of everything that is difficult to repeat."

What about Ahmed Rami?

"Rami came to me with his handsomeness and his strong desire to turn everything into a poem; the way he ironed the suit, the way he adjusted the tarboosh (red headcover) on his head, even "good morning" he says as if he is trying out the key of a song. He said that he stopped by the Sheikh to hear something new he wrote and at the same time he stayed up late at his house. The sheikh got up to make two cups of tea, teasing Rami:

- May God forgive you for your wrongdoing."

That night, the sheikh was struck with hemiplegia, and he said while laughing in front of Rami who was fighting back tears: "Oh man, you are supposed to congratulate me; paralysis is the disease of the great. Am I better than Al-Jahiz or Al-Isfahani?" And (the Lady) confesses: “My hope of my femininity being completed by his hands has collapsed. He suppresses desire, so that nothing remains for the lover but tenderness. I no longer see in him anything but my old child." Her crying in front of the man torments him, so Sami Bey El Shawa begs her not to cry, because he laughs in front of her, but when she leaves he collapses "until the political pen police themselves are unable to stop their tears."

He will scatter on the pages the stories of the Lady as she experiences courtship with the fairer sex, a girl with (Aziza), and a young woman with more than one character, including the forty-year-old admirer who asked to meet her after the end of the Ramses Cinema party: 

"If the first of the month is the first night of the moon, and the first of the people is their nobleman... then this is a lady after the first of the month, her figure is the first and last example of what a woman's body should be, the length when it reaches its fullness, neither more nor less, the domes that emerge here, and the smooth skin without the slightest sagging there.

And the perfume? 

God damn this perfume! Or do you see it as the natural scent of a complete, independent body? A body that does not need the necks of men to be twisted to enhance its self-confidence; the mouth smells of mint, the breasts tell the story of rosemary, and the armpits are filled with a mixture of mandarin and lemon. I have no doubt that there is - you certainly understand what I mean - the scent of freshly cut grass blowing strongly."

In her masculine attire, Umm Kulthum did not reveal her true identity to the visitor, but rather told the elegant woman that she was the maid, and the night was a turning point for her to bid farewell to the coat and the headband and discover her femininity:

"I rediscover my body. I no longer wear the coat and the headband or hide my breasts away from people. I will not disguise myself as a beardless Bedouin boy who, with the kohl of his eyes and the softness of his voice, arouses a desire hidden in the distant shadows."

I particularly enjoyed the chapters in which the biography of the Lady intersected with Sheikh Mustafa Abdul Razek, the Sheikh of Al-Azhar. I lived with him as a traveler and a resident, after I completed his journey outside Egypt (Memoirs of a Traveler) and inside it (Sheikh Mustafa Abdel Razek, a Traveler and Resident). I learned of his favor to singing when he provided that generous umbrella under which Umm Kulthum sang, which made her presence in Cairo and her freedom in art available. Indeed, the transformation from the character of the villager Thouma to the person of the Cairene Umm Kulthum began its revolutionary stages here, in the palace of the Sheikh of Al-Azhar.

The chapters that began with the biography of Sheikh Mustafa Abdul Razek can be called stations of fictional imagination of events "crafted by the author's imagination based on hidden events and forgotten truths."

But, with the difference of these stations, we will find the language that accompanied us in poetry, in popular proverbs, and it touches on references to the statement in the verses of the Holy Book, and other than the language we will find the eye of the historian who refutes rumors, and the critic who evaluates texts, and the witness who summons what protects the mystery of his fictional reality.

At Abdel Halim Hafez's station, we will not mention his name, for he is (the boy), not (the son of the revolution), but (the son of the fool), and the audience calls him (the nightingale), she will regain her ability to mock with others, since she was a child who broke the boards of the school-goers in the village because she was deprived of education, to laughing at Abdel Hakim Amer, when he wanted to bring the third part for the young singer, and then she knew (through a composer in the band), so she sent someone to inform President Gamal Abdel Nasser of her intention to celebrate the July Revolution with a song that she would sing for the first time: 

"It does not matter that the tune of the song - Far from You, My Life is Torment - is not ready, and the band did not rehearse it enough, so I will use my influence to delete it from the radio and television recordings later; the important thing is that I performed the third part, and dealt a double slap to the boy and his official sponsor... His Excellency the Minister of War. What did your emotional singer do? He filled the world and occupied people with the only story he is good at, his stomach could not bear it and bled, the moon collapsed and cried, , and I am the wolf whose cheeks bleed, do not blame me if when he approaches me at the wedding of Hoda, the daughter of “The President” ayes”, I turn my face away as if I do not see him.  Umm Kulthum will be forced to write about her doctor, El-Hafnawi, by name, a necessity that did not prevent her from revealing everything she wanted to say about him, in his harsh language, while other names were omitted, as if there was an implicit agreement between the novelist Mohamed Baraka and his phone that dictates to him; Umm Kulthum, not to mention controversial names, perhaps for legal reasons, so we will read about Asmahan without seeing the letters of her name, and we will know Mohamed El-Tabai without recalling his title, and we will dive into her battle with the composer Zakaria Ahmed without his name being written down, as was the case with Abdel Halim. As if the hand that tamed the dung from the agricultural path in the fertile soil of her village did not wash it completely, and was bringing it, fresh and hot like a body whose soul had just ascended, to place it on the biography of one who did not stand captive to it, obedient to its tyranny.  Is it true that love is overwhelming? I almost know.