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A telephone receiver morphs into a lobster.
A miniature train rushes from a fireplace.
Suggestive mosques and rotten meats. Pharos reduced to stones.
Clocks melting on barren branches.
A doorway into the Sinai desert.
“Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all” – Andre Breton
A cloud passing over Cairo.
These are images commonly associated with Surrealism, a powerful artistic and cultural idea that sparked in Paris in the 1920s as a reaction to the traumas that emerged from the First World War. It might seem strange that war and culture might be so intertwined, but it was the sheer scale, horror and tragedy of the conflicts that led to the emergence of an alternative way of seeing.
The OG surrealists sought something deeper—something more meaningful, genuine, more sublime than the unsatisfactory state of the so-called ‘modern’ world. While it appeared ‘civilised’ on the surface, it was still cloaked in tribalism, division, and conquest, leaving many artistically inclined individuals feeling profoundly disillusioned. Think of Surrealism as an attempt to break away from the conventional and the imposed, in pursuit of a fling with forgotten roads.
A Pleasure Cruise Away From Modern Suffering
The world, as it was becoming increasingly consumeristic and less creative, was no longer satisfactory, and the Surrealists sought to challenge this by exposing the relentless machine of modernisation that threatened to tear down whatever stood in the way of progress and consumption. The Surrealists believed that capitalism could be resisted and set out to discover the marvellous outside the mainstream—in those objects that had fallen outside capitalist circulation.
The movement’s magic lies in the laps of its early contributors, who wandered the streets of Paris—not ‘looking’ but rather ‘hoping to find’ strange beauty in the unexpected and unseen, the disregarded and unconventional. On these long, aimless promenades, the original Surrealists avoided paths that led them to iconic people and places. Instead, they took detours to unearth the unkempt corners of the city and their own minds. They wandered to see – not to be seen, blurring the lines between waking and dream life.
You can see why tourist hotspots would not strike a chord with these finders and seekers. Walking was an artistic device, and on these ambulatory excursions, poetic depths were made possible on promenades. The Eifel tower was of no interest to the early wanderers. They were far more interested in the road less travelled.
As I write, I can safely say that this is the closest I have ever felt to the surrealist spirit—getting lost meaningfully, mysteriously, and fabulously, giving a chance for the alternative to occur, as reality has been painfully disappointing this year. Interestingly, the movement is making a comeback, with Gen Z witnessing the sheer scale of horror unfolding on their phones from Palestinian homes. Surreal art has been emerging on the gram as a response to the collective traumas—depictions of destroyed mosques and martyrs wrapped in glitter and commemorated with fairy dust, watermelons sprouting from beneath the rubble, and olive trees dancing in the night sky.
Let me tell you, if I may, that Surrealism cannot and should not be reduced to escapism from the horrors of war and the soullessness of modern life. It is not a denialist movement, but a creative response to it.
As I write this—and as you’ll read later in the opening of my novella Rock, Paper, Scissors—my home in Lebanon is billowing in the flames of rift. Yet, here I am, responding and thriving through my pen.
“What I want to show in my images is the beauty of failure” (Salvador Dalí)
At the core of surrealist work is combining the conscious and the subconscious and having the willingness to champion poetic pockets and revolutionary ideas in a search for freedom. The movement tapped into Karl Marx’s writing as well as Freud’s ideas about dreams and psychology to experiment with automatic writing and free association so that their subconscious reveals meaningful work.
The word ‘surrealist’ (suggesting ‘beyond reality’) was coined by the French avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire. But it was Andre Breton, the so-called leader of the Surrealist movement, who, in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), wrote:
“The surrealist laboratory could not conduct its experiments solely in the artist’s studio of the poet’s study or the philosopher’s mind; it needed lived experience, and it needed the street – the ordinary street that crisscrossed Paris – to achieve the resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.”
Since its early inception, the movement has travelled and evolved from place to place and time to time, despite its founder’s reservations and growing need to control it. Yes, Andre Breton did write the original manifesto – but as with all peculiar and grand ideas, there’s an almost spiritual scope that transcends the author, the founder, and the leader, and lands on the lap of the broader public.
In the famous words of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, an Indian nationalist whose defiance of British colonial authority made him a hero: “One individual may die for an idea, but that idea will, after his death, incarnate itself in a thousand lives!”
Literary Liaisons
The Meeting of Minds: Andre Breton and George Henein
From Parisian promenades without purpose to Cairo’s proudly pulsating populace… toward the Nile of Surrealism.
In the ten years after Andre Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, he was busy building the movement from Paris. Meanwhile, over 3000 kilometres away, Egypt experienced some of the same post-war turmoil that led to Surrealism in Europe. Though Egypt did not take part directly in World War One, it was a British protectorate and became an important base for Allied forces.
Surrealism, as both a cultural and political movement, sparked in Egypt after it was established in Europe, but its interpretation in the Arab world was just as interesting – perhaps even more profound if you ask me – given the struggles of the time.
The Egyptian poet and provocateur George Henein played a central role in the founding of Surrealism. Henein was very much a citizen of the world, which was quite unusual for his time. He was born in Cairo just before the start of the World War in 1914 and was just ten years old when Breton first wrote the Surrealist Manifesto from Paris.
His father was an Egyptian diplomat, and his mother was an Egyptian-Italian anti-fascist. Henein experienced cosmopolitanism from a young age, spending his early years between Egypt, Italy, Spain and France where he studied at the Sorbonne.
Paris’s streets and cafes were cultural and artistic melting pots for artists, writers and philosophers exchanging perceptions about the future, and Georges Henein thrived in this creative environment. When he returned to Egypt in 1934, he wanted to share fresh ideas, especially about the new surrealist way of thinking.
Henein discovered surrealism through Breton’s writing and manifesto and sent him the first letter in 1936. The correspondence began, sparking a friendship between the father of surrealism and eager Henein.
“The demon of corruption was in Paris just like it was in Cairo”
Their literary liaison started with a letter from George Henein, and when Andre Breton replied, their correspondence gradually became a cultural bridge between Paris and Cairo.
Henein sent the letter without knowing Breton personally. He wrote about his interest in the movement and linked it to the surrealist movement he planned to start in Egypt. Breton replied in April 1936 telling Henein that he saw many similarities between the conditions of Paris and Cairo. Breton used his now famous expression: “The demon of corruption was in Paris just like it was in Cairo.” In Breton’s first letter to Henein, he expressed his curiosity and wanted to know what was happening in Egypt. Was there something different there compared with France? Were there new trends? What are the differentiation factors?
At the start of their liaison, the age difference between them was around fifteen years. Henein was young, writing daring and somewhat provocative articles and trying to make a name for himself in the world of literature.
Henein decided to return to Paris in May 1936, a few months after their correspondence began. He wanted to meet Andre Breton in person to exchange ideas about surrealism, which by then, had become a global movement. He found out where Breton lived and like the early seekers, he wandered… (well, purposely) to his house. He knocked on the door. The door opened and he found himself in front of the father figure of Surrealism.
Henein caught Breton in a very intimate moment, dealing with family matters. Breton was busy taking care of his daughter and had been having marital problems with his wife. The two gentlemen left from this moving eclipse into Breton’s private life to the Café de Flore. There, they sat with the OG surrealists.
The cafe later became a social and literary place to be. Writers like Albert Camus and Simone De Beauvoir, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and the artist Pablo Picasso, were all regulars there. But when Breton and Henein met, the Café de Flore was synonymous with surrealism.
Through their literary correspondence and collaboration, Henein’s gains were emotional, moral, intellectual, and political. Their liaison sometimes took the form of a student-teacher relationship. However, George Henein was quite a steadfast character and did not strike anyone as an imitator.
In his letters, Henein always asked Breton. “Tell me what you think. Your opinion is important to me.” On a separate occasion, he wrote: “Today I received L’amour Fou ‘Mad Love,’” (a book written by Breton.) “I’ll have a glass of alcohol tonight and light a candle to read Mad Love.”
However, their meetings and correspondences were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. It was getting difficult to meet, and the mail service was affected – so their relationship wasn’t as strong.
These years were an important and fundamental stage in the development of Surrealism through an Egyptian lens.
Birth: Art and Liberty
Egypt, 1938
Around 140,000 British troops occupied the city, and World War II was ready to burst. The first inklings of Surrealism already simmered under Egypt’s troubled surface, as artists and writers corresponded with Surrealists across borders – from Mexico to Beirut, London and Tokyo. At this point, it had become a global movement, and Breton could no longer keep a tightrope from his so-called command centre.
That same year in Cairo, a group of thirty-seven artists, writers, lawyers, filmmakers and intellectuals gathered to fight against British colonial rule, a rising Fascist ideology, and the local conservative art scene. The group rejected the convergence of art and nationalism and was born out of a backlash to the highly conservative Salon du Caire.
The Salon held a novel art gathering, drawing visitors in the thousands, but the emerging collective detested how the exhibition classified artists according to nationality.
At the time, art was expected to be nationalistic, with idealised visions of Egypt at the centre of every creation – and anything outside these bounds, such as more abstract works, was considered morally corrupt.
A Doorway Into The Sinai Desert
With these suffocating limitations in mind and a group of 37 pioneers endorsing a new way of thinking – a distinct form of Egyptian Surrealism known as ‘Art and Liberty’ was born.
The movement was active from 1938 to 1948, giving Egypt the surrealist voice it needed to battle politics with art, embarking on a mission rooted in social and moral revolution.
Art and Liberty created a unique reworking of Surrealism – making it not ‘just’ a surrealist group, but rather, a non-sectarian alliance of modern-minded cultural activists, men and women alike, brought together by a quest to challenge the status quo.
The group understood that surrealism would find little appeal and a lot of criticism in Egypt which took such pride in its national identity. Despite backlash from the national press, their advocacy for open creative expression and more personal and political liberties would eventually find its niche amongst a frustrated yet creative audience.
The collective was pioneering new art forms and mounting rebellious exhibitions that sent shockwaves across local artistic circles in Cairo and Alexandria. The national press made fun of them because they represented a stark challenge to the static thinking in Egypt at the time.
From Art and Liberty’s perspective, even the iconography of Umm Kulthum had to be questioned because of her ties with the status-co, the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser. The synergy between the mother figure of Egyptian music and politics captivated the public, yet it provoked the very nature of Art and Liberty because of its ties to Nasserism, a vision cloaked in nationalism.
The group withstood criticism and even grew to embrace it as one does with a rose and her stems – pushing forward with their own manifesto (see below) which distinguished them from the broader global surrealist movement. This shift changed the dynamic from one of Western dependence to a more balanced conversation.
Naturally, the evolving relationship between Breton and Henein came to reflect this newfound independence, ultimately leading to a complete rupture.
Long Live Degenerate Art!
At the end of 1938, things came to a boil when poet and provocateur George Henein, alongside brothers Anwar Kamel (a writer and activist) and Fouad Kamel (an artist), and pioneer Kamel El-Telmisany, could no longer hold the curtains, and so released their first independent manifesto: Long Live Degenerate Art.
The manifesto culminated cries against the smothering of self-expression and advocated for the loosening of the government’s hand in the artists’ works – therefore establishing an independent revolutionary art movement.
As you now know, the group despised nationalistic art and art for art’s sake. They reclaimed the term “degenerate,” following the Nazi use of the term for art and writing that did not align with the nationalistic and fascist party line.
“We find absurd, and deserving of total disdain, the religious, racist, and nationalist prejudices that make up the tyranny of certain individuals who, drunk on their own temporary omniscience, seek to subjugate the destiny of the work of art,” declared the manifesto.
During the war, Art and Liberty mounted 5 controversial “Independent Art Expositions” opposing imperialism and capitalism between 1940 and 1945. They also produced at least three different periodicals during that same period.
Members of the Art and Liberty group, whose works you have encountered on these pages, held solo art exhibitions in Cairo and Alexandria. Many of these artists published their own pamphlets and engaged in various agitational activities, emphasising anti-imperialism, women’s rights, poverty relief, and opposition to police brutality. They moved between film screenings, lectures, and fundraisers—echoing the activism of today’s millennials who unite worldwide to support the preservation of Palestinian culture and heritage.
The collective championed home-grown issues that sadly aren’t out of place today. The Greek-Egyptian artist trained in Paris, Mayo, criticised police brutality in his Coups de Batȏns (1937).
The right of women to a free life was a central theme in the work of Inji Aflatoun, an important member of the group. She painted her first oil painting while still a student. During this period, her work often depicted girls escaping from natural elements like fire and other living beings confronting harsh realities.
Then there’s Kamel El-Telmisany’s Untitled (1940), depicting women being crucified, a metaphor for their suffering and crucifixion by circumstance, life, and war.
Similar to their criticism of Umm Kulthoum’s link with ultra-national identity, pharaonic imagery was used as government propaganda – so Art and Liberty used such elements and twisted them to appear broken, extracting from their megaphone mark on the mainstream. An untitled 1939 painting by Ramses Younane depicts the body of a goddess bent awkwardly, while Ida Kar’s collage-like photographs subvert images of Egyptian temples and icons, with flesh-flecked ribs instead of temple columns and majestic pyramids cupped in the palm of a hand.
Female Workers Of All Lands Be Beautiful
There were pioneering women in the group, namely artists Inji Aflatoun and Amy Nimr who made feminism a central concern in their work. They hosted salons where they connected the collective to surrealist figures both locally and internationally, facilitating the expression of concern for women’s plight.
The men in the group also championed the cause for women’s rights, mainly through Kamel El-Telmissany’s journal Al Tatawwur, the first avant-garde, surrealist, and Marxist-libertarian publication to come out of the Arab world. Al Tatawwur was published monthly until July 1940, when Egyptian authorities closed the journal down and jailed Anwar Kamel for his writing.
What draws me to the Art and Liberty movement is the fact that, while some members, like Amy Nimr, came from wealth and privilege, others were born into poor Egyptian households and forged their way into the group through talent, relentless work ethic, and the lionhearted quality that some individuals naturally possess.
Ramses Younan was one such pioneer of a poor man who never left his native land. The simultaneous proximity and distance of Nimr and Younan is a reminder of how Surrealism was a movement that could be of interest to any artist, in any country, crossing over social and geographical boundaries.
As I mature as a writer, I realize that class struggle is central to liberation. Both the bourgeois and the working class suffer in different but interconnected ways. Working-class individuals who view life as solely harsh may overlook the fact that they have the opportunity to build genuine friendships, form authentic connections, and live in the present with hope for a better future.
Rupture
In 1947, Breton made Henein a member of CAUSE, an international coalition for post-war surrealists. But Henein’s loyalty to Breton came to an end in 1948 due to creative differences that drove the two men apart. This rupture, along with increasing local political challenges ultimately led to the dissolution of Art and Liberty.
By the early 1950s, the group had begun to disband. After the coup in 1952 led by General Nasser, some fled into exile for fear of imprisonment.
Since then, many have dismissed the Art and Liberty Group as a failed attempt to impose Occidental values on traditional Egyptian art. However, even though this period of Egyptian Surrealists shook Cairo’s streets almost a century ago and lasted only ten years, the group’s commitment to social justice led to the Arab Surrealist movement in the mid-1970s, led principally by poet Abdul Kader El Janabi.
Exiled artists from Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria signed the 1975 manifesto, which identified Surrealism as “A permanent revolution against the world of aesthetics and other atrophied categories: the destruction and supersession of all retrograde forces and inhibitions. Subversion resides in Surrealism the same way history resides in events.”
Rock, Paper, Scissors
A doorway into my “Sur-real” novella
The girls peer through the sunlit glasshouse of St. Joseph Church, a rare sight in the southern suburbs of Beirut, breeder of bearded men and ideas of militant resistance. They lean their dark limbs against the Virgin Mary; their curls are flecked with stained glass in hues of divine fruit.
Cries are heard outside, and the smell of pink smoke seeps through the door beneath the mother of all mothers, the Mary that saved them.
“If we were living in a building, we’d be dead,” says Dunya, browsing her friend’s forehead in shock.
It had been an hour since the atomic bomb had detonated just 5 kilometres away, half at sea, the other in the city, wiping friends and fish alike. There is no signal, not just in church but the whole country is out. The girls fall silent for some time.
“Should we open the door?” says Naila, checking that she’s still alive, still here.
Sirens echo through the church like a horrifying gospel.
They hold hands and forcefully push the divine’s heavy door wide open. Eyes closed; Dunya whispers the words her mother once whispered in her ear: ‘Why stay in prison when the door is so wide open?’
As for Naila, she looks ahead, her eyes nearly blinded by the sight of missing limbs and birds fluttering in a frenzy beneath a blood-red sky.
“Open your eyes.” she pleads, “I can’t witness this alone.”
Dunya’s eyelids are still shut, resisting reality. The event unfolding is too much to bear, and this witness wants to wander within. Dunya holds a soul that finds poetry in poverty, divinity in destruction, and sexual tension in terror. She is out of her mind, or we are. Just like Naila’s mother, Dunya is so die-hard delusional that being around her feels completely freeing.
Meanwhile Naila has her hands clenched beneath her blouse as she scans the street for a safe exit. It’s a warm and sunny afternoon, but it’s impossible to tell if the sun has set behind the smoke. The yellow star pivots through the fire, and Naila begs her friend to bear witness once again.
Dunya gently opens her eyes, green as the palms of paradise, and pushes out a cry. Her friend grabs her by the hand and together, they run – leaving their duffel bags and pink laptop behind.
The pink laptop means a lot to the poor girls who, without access to technology, might remain without shelter forever. Dunya is certain it’s a phase, that this too shall pass – but Naila begs to differ and needs the tech to provide. After all, the little family of two needs to eat.
As they run through the city, salvaging what’s left of their youth before death strikes again, they stop and stare at the scene they’re escaping. In that moment, the girls understood that where they were standing marked the difference between life and death. Entire apartment blocks have been levelled and concrete is covered in neighbours’ blood.
Dunya’s heart is filled with the knowledge that sheltering in the church had saved them, while Naila seems to be vengeful under the sky above. The flat from which they were evicted had been floored.
“What a shitty rental it was anyway,” says Naila.
“Come on, it was home. I get that you’re angry, but don’t do that to our memories.”
“The landlord left us on the streets and changed the locks. Anyway, look at us now,” she continues with an unforgiving glint in her eye.
Dunya nods, a half-smile appearing on her sullen face. “We’re untouchable.”
The girls agree on one thing—there’s something powerful about escaping the very thing that almost got you.
“The laptop!” shouts a frazzled Naila. “We have to go back!”
Her friend whispers a short prayer beneath her breath—one to Allah, the other to the unifying field. “Okay,” she replies. “Let’s do that, Nai.”
With that, they head back down the road they had come from, toward the church where they had taken refuge after exhausting the generosity of their friends’ couches. Dunya took no offence; even the most giving need to give themselves – and to be fair, they hadn’t explicitly communicated that they were on the brink of homelessness. As for Naila, she severed ties with anyone who dared to ask where they planned to stay next.
As they open the doors of the church, they notice a young man in the far-left corner of the altar, standing behind their duffel bags. He hadn’t been there when they rushed out earlier.
“We’re here for our stuff,” Naila shouts, though the man hadn’t asked.
He nods aimlessly, visibly still in shock at the events unfolding outside. His left arm is smeared with scars, and his shirt hangs in half, as if shredded by lightning. The sight of the shred reminds Dunya of a friendship bracelet—a half-heart charm she carried with her when she left her hometown in Cairo, hoping for a better life in Beirut.
The girls rush to check that their laptop is still safely tucked inside one of the duffel bags containing all their belongings. They lift the duffels onto their bare backs and make their way down the church corridor.
As they open the door to leave, the young man throws a bottle of water their way and gathers the strength to say, ‘Watch the road.’ His breath is heavy with perspiration.
Naila catches it and winks back like a comrade, while Dunya sends a sensuous smile that makes the bloodied man blush. She will flirt with anyone—cats, people, trees, terrorists, even purists. For her, separation is boring. Naila however, believes that ego transcends only in death—while we’re here, we need it. After all, Naila means ‘achiever’ in Arabic.
This time, as they leave the church, Dunya’s eyes are wide open, and the shock has settled. She murmurs a prayer from the Qu’ran beneath her breath to thank the shelter for what it had done—save their lives. Islam is the religion she was born into and still subscribes to to this day.
Naila, on the other hand, is the Christian who negotiated their stay in the church for the week. She too deserves credit—so Dunya includes her in secret since Naila had given up on believing, but her friend wanted desperately to bring her back to her faith.
Words: Tania Khalil
