Half a Day

“We walked along a street lined with gardens; on both sides were extensive fields planted with crops, prickly pears, henna trees, and a few date palms.” 

Although Mahfouz never specifies the exact time and place of the story, the above description of the narrator’s home implies the work is set in early 20th-century Cairo; date palms and henna trees grow throughout the Middle East and have cultural significance in Egypt, while the agrarian nature of the boy’s surroundings suggests that the story begins in a preindustrial setting. The reference to gardens also has religious significance, suggesting a link between the boy’s home and the paradise from which humanity is expelled in Islamic tradition.

“School’s not a punishment. It’s the factory that makes useful men out of boys. Don’t you want to be like your father and brothers?” 

Although it’s intended as praise, the father’s description of school reveals Mahfouz’s skepticism not just of the educational system, but also of the other institutions that monopolize our time in modern society. Mahfouz, who worked for many years as a bureaucrat, here depicts school as a dehumanizing process concerned only with producing people who serve a “useful” purpose in society. In comparing school to a factory, he also implicitly associates this tendency with industrialization and its demand for a compliant labor force. It’s also noteworthy that the narrator’s father needs to reassure him that school isn’t a punishment; combined with the narrator’s sense that he’s being expelled from his home, this idea of punishment recalls the story of the Garden of Eden.