Captain Ni’mat’s Last Battle
By Mohamed Leftah
Translated by Lara Vergnaud
Other Press, 2022

The Moroccan novelist Mohamed Leftah died of cancer in 2008, and thanks to the good folks at Other Press, he makes his English-language debut with Lara Vergnaud’s translation of le dernier combat du captain Ni’mat. 

The book is small, not even 150 pages, and although its rhetoric is pleasingly baroque, its plot is simple: an Egyptian man named Captain Ni’mat, a mild-mannered army reservist and retired pilot, is leading an orderly, staid life: pool visits with his contemporaries, pleasant, settled home routines with his wife, hardly a variation. Into this calm pattern suddenly one day erupts an erotic dream – about his young Nubian servant, Islam. 

He doesn’t dismiss the dream upon waking. Instead, with a kind of amazed, quiet panic in his heart, he acts on it in scenes of remarkable delicacy. “Captain Ni’mat was annoyed at himself for talking and tried to empty his mind, to relax his body so fully that he was nothing but skin, his tactile sense on alert,” goes one such moment. “With his eyes and his fingertips, Islam noted this relaxation, an abandonment that was almost a bodily offering made him by his master. It was then that his fingers, instinctually, began a wordless dialogue with the thickset body he felt gradually loosening and softening in their wake.” 

There are complications looming everywhere, of course. Most predictable is the element of strangeness this new development introduces to Captain Ni’mat’s marriage. Less predictable and less savory are the class ramifications – the good captain’s erotic feelings might be awakening, but he still mostly views Islam as little more than a house pet. It’s only when their illicit relationship is coming to an end that Ni’mat warms up enough to tell the boy to think of him as an understanding, loving father, somebody Islam can turn to at any time. “These words moved Islam to tears,” Leftah writes, adding a note that sounds throughout the book. “But the code of virility and honor internalized in men, in virile males like him, in Arab-Muslim [sic] societies beginning in childhood, erected its immaterial, impenetrable iron dyke [sic], and kept the tears of emotion from pouring forth, from falling freely on shimmering cheeks that they would have softened and relaxed.”

This broader sociological aside happens often enough in Captain Ni’mat’s Last Battle to make the book a reflection on Egyptian society as much as it is a surprisingly delicate parable of male love. At one point Captain Ni’mat glumly mopes about how the “game of seduction” is long over in his increasingly-fundamentalist society. “Was there anyone left in this country who felt the desire to please and seduce, who took pride in their appearance?” he wonders. “Judging from all the bodies buried beneath gray, bushy beards, the women’s hair imprisoned by veils, one might think that seduction had become an insult to God and an attack against one’s fellow man.”

The novel ends with an excerpt from Captain Ni’mat’s diary, and this final flourish is the narrative’s most vivid and dreamlike extravagance, glancing at the seismic changes the captain’s life has undergone and draping it all in the imagery of the gods of ancient Egypt. It’s an oddly histrionic flight of fancy on which to end such a buttoned-up story, but the story itself is quietly touching, particularly given how resolutely homophobic Egyptian society continues to be even the fourteen years since the author’s death. One wonders how many Ni’mats have read this little book in secret since it first appeared.

-Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.