Sometimes what lies beneath the surface can have a much greater impact than what is clearly in view. Remember the Titanic? The infamous ship almost certainly wouldn’t have sunk if the captain had seen the entire iceberg the boat fatally crashed into, instead of just the tip of it. Ernest Hemingway famously developed this concept into a writing style, which is now commonly known as The Iceberg Theory. The Egyptian writer Mohamed Tawfik succinctly sums Hemingway’s method up as “writing around the issue” and, like the great American writer, he is steadily building up his own catalog based on this style. “In my stories, I don’t deal directly with the issues I consider to be important, but instead I write around them,” he tells Egyptian Streets. “I once wrote a short story about a rape [incident], but from the point of view of a homeless person who is nearby scouring garbage bins for food. “He describes the sounds he hears, but he never actually sees what happens. The rape is in the background and that is exactly why it becomes more prominent in the reader’s mind. The reader can’t help…
‘We are so much less than we should be’: Writer Mohamed Tawfik on Egypt, Literature and More
April 18, 2016
