English Art/Literary Poetry & Literature

In The Committee Ibrahim deals with Coca-Cola: its company, power, and impact on American politics, its grooming of presidents like Jimmy Carter, and its participation in international events. He declares how Coca-Cola “has been so influential in the greatest and richest country in the world” and how much influence it exercises abroad, in “third world countries” (22 – 23). Moreover, “this slender bottle . . . played a decisive role in the choice of our mode of life, the inclinations of our tastes, the presidents and kings of our countries, the wars we partici-pated in, and the treaties we entered into” (23). The beverage is symp-tomatic of other products that exercise a hegemonic grip. Its globality is the gateway to influence and domination worldwide, especially in the underdeveloped and developing countries. The novel as research manipulates material, documentation, and detail to account for the two dominating aspects of culture industry: the ad, with its media circuits, and then the grooming of elites for specific roles. This issue comes to the fore when the committee sends the following terse telegram: “We await a study on the greatest contemporary Arab luminary” (31). The command, for that is what it is, is only the sinister face of commissioned biographies and profiles. It is also a trap, for it has already exposed the protagonist’s leanings and interests and blocked all probable channels of research that may jeopardize the secrecy and clandestine dealings of the committee’s middlemen. Hence the protagonist’s resort to little magazines and derivative publications. The opposite of the global is this little circuit: the unnoticed, the unnoticeable, and the marginal, which is another trope for the endangered nation.