As a young Marxist he dodged prison by traveling to Moscow on a graduate scholarship, only to fall afoul of the Soviet authorities after the Egyptian government terminated his scholarship, leaving him without an income. Surour was a lifelong dissident, repeatedly arrested and tortured for his views. And there is no better example of that than the short, tragic life of Surour whose poetry shocked Egyptians through the 1960s and 1970s. In modern times it became a truer expression of fraught reality than decent, respectable literature ever could be. That kind of writing tears away the veil of propriety and derives its power from obscenity. But, aside from the delicate feelings and refined tastes so abundant in Jahin’s work, the Arabic literary canon has always had another strand, rich in profane scenes and blasphemous references. The Arabic word for literature, “adab” also means decorum - implying that good language and good manners are ultimately the same thing. But he paid a price for his honesty because many preferred Jahin’s less jarring style of writing. It was a way of telling uncomfortable truths. The foul language was far from gratuitous, though. They reflected the system’s lies and injustices, and their author’s unbending devotion to what he called his “knight’s heart … in love with the truth.” His poetry expressed raw emotions and often did so with expletives. Surour’s verses, on the other hand, came out of desperation and despair.
Jahin’s work was elegant and powerful, but it arose from the comfort and security of a successful man of letters who accepted the powers that be. “So I wander around with the short end of the stick up my arse from Russia to Hungary to Egypt,” he said, “and they tell you he is depressed.” “He’s very depressed,” Naqqash sighed, referring to the effects on Jahin’s psyche of both Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and Nasser’s death three years later. He inquired after another, far more successful poet - Salah Jahin - who, unlike him, had supported the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Despite his disheveled appearance, Surour turned out to be lucid.
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Alarmed at the sight, Naqqash asked the driver to stop and pulled his friend into the taxi next to him. The friend was Ragaa al-Naqqash, a prominent literary critic. Egyptian poet Naguib Surour was tramping the streets of Cairo dressed in a tattered, filthy galabiyya (a long, loose-fitting garment), dragging a broomstick and talking to himself when, according to the story, an old friend spotted him from a taxi.
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