I spent a month or so wandering around Egypt in the late spring of 1998. I went there from Germany, where I had been studying for the previous year. I did not inform anyone of where I was going, not my roommates in Münster nor my parents in California, and this charged the trip with a tremendous extra dose of intrigue and excitement. It also exposed me to intense crises of existential loneliness. A few dozen German tourists had been mowed down the month before by Islamists while walking through the Valley of the Kings, and the conventional wisdom was that you were not supposed to be wandering around at all, let alone wandering around without having left the proper emergency-notification information.
One night, on top of Mt. Sinai, I tried to sleep, shivering in a sleeping bag, as a group of Chinese evangelicals sang 'Amazing Grace' around a campfire, in Chinese, for hours on end. I decided to walk back down to the settlement at the base of the mountain. It was terribly cold and dark and I could not see the trail. There were flighted creatures --bats or birds, I don't know-- swooping down as if to harass me, and I quickly grew uncertain that I would find my way. No one I knew had any idea what country I was in. Was this an enjoyable sensation? It was a sort of epitome, in the old sense of encapsulation, of the generally manic-depressive condition that had brought me there in the first place, which might be summed up by the motto: I'm free! I'm free! I'm alone.
There were camels along the highway of the Sinai --real camels, not show camels, let out to graze by their Bedouin masters-- and the driver we hired to take us from Sharm El-Sheikh to wherever it is up near Israel that you can sleep on the beach for cheap (who the 'we' is is a question I might not have time to get to here, in any case it didn't last for the duration of the journey), he didn't think the prospect of hitting one of them was an important enough reason to turn on his headlights. He said it's inconsiderate to oncoming drivers to make them drive into the glare. There's the fatum mahometanum Montesquieu wrote about, I thought.
I had left Cath Neumann back in Cairo. She was a punk from Leeds, and had spent the previous eight months hitching from South Africa to Egypt, by herself. She was slowed down in Botswana when two adolescents held her up at knife-point and forced her to hand over her earthly belongings. Though an anarchist, she pressed charges, and the next she knew she was testifying in a drawn-out trial, which ended in the sentencing of two sixteen-year-old Africans to something like forty years in prison for stealing a white girl's backpack.
Anyway this is just to say that Cath had been around, and was not afraid to mingle. I, being utterly afraid or at least loath to mingle, really did not belong in Egypt at all. I was younger then and unlike today --I am now as good as invisible on the streets of any city-- easily got wrapped up in pointless and often dangerous conspiracies with just-met coevals. By the end of my first day in Cairo I had been talked in, by some smoothie named Hamdi with a bit of English, to going to the state-run liquor store, at which one needs to show a foreign ID in order to enter, to make some provisions for his cousin's wedding. It quickly came to seem to me that everyone in Egypt has far more cousins than I do, and they are all perpetually about to get married.
I had been pressured by Hamdi into this errand, pressured into a taxi with him to some squalid quarter of the city, into strained fraternity of a sort I would never even think of attempting with my own countrymen, until at some point I reached my limit of tolerance and began to yell at him: I don't know you. I don't care about your cousin's wedding. You have your alcohol, now have fun. I'm going back to my hotel.
On my way back, walking down a narrow alley just near Tahrir Square, I was accosted by a group of urchins. Their leader looked to be about sixteen; he had some sort of grease in his hair and a pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of his t-shirt. "I hear you've been to the liquor store with Hamdi," he said. Yes, I replied, I suppose I have been. There was a tense silence, and I imagined he was about to pull a switchblade or something, but then he cracked a smile, and said, as if quoting a line from Menace II Society, or The Outsiders, or West Side Story: "You know what? I respect you."
I'm honored, I said, and I started walking. I entered the lobby of my hotel, a cut-rate and dusty but still majestic colonial-era building, and I started to walk up the spiral staircase. The kid followed me in and rushed to hit the buttons for the old cage elevator. "I'll bring the elevator for you. You wait," he said. I told him I preferred to walk. "I am getting the elevator. It is coming. You wait." I kept walking. When it arrived he got in and, moving up through the middle of the stairs, quickly caught up with me. "I did this for you," he pleaded through the wire mesh of the cage. "Why didn't you wait?" Old elevators scare me, I explained as I continued to move up the stairs. "You disrespected me," he said.
When we arrived at the hotel level an employee saw the kid in the elevator and began yelling at him in Arabic. The question of respect and disrespect ended right there, as my would-be blood-brother, Hamdi's rival, a familiar nuisance to the hotel staff, darted out of the elevator and disappeared down the stairs. The employee went back to the dingy desk and sat down. Behind the counter he had a black-and-white TV, on which he was watching a public address from Hosni Mubarak. Cath was sitting on a sofa in the corner writing post cards. She was wearing a t-shirt with a quotation from Oscar Wilde: "I have nothing to declare except my genius."
The details are fuzzy but soon enough Cath and I were setting out to Giza to see the pyramids. Now she had seen the Nubian pyramids of Sudan and for her there was something far too easy about this quick jaunt out of Cairo. But the ease of it, and the conventionality, lent it a sweet character, something almost like what could be called a 'date', if the two daters' politics and personalities weren't so stubbornly exceptional.
We took a bus, and along the way she told me about a costume party at her commune in Leeds where she went as the 'personification' of the Situationist slogan: Sous les pavés la plage. Soon enough we were accosted by another young man who wanted, somehow, to implicate us in his life. He happened to live in Giza, and before we knew it we were sitting on the dirt floor of his parents' home. His mother and sister cowered in the kitchen, and periodically darted out to serve us bean paste, bread, and tea, without ever looking us in the eyes. The young man showed us his Boney M cassette. A donkey stuck its head in through the sheet that hung in place of a front door.
I have no memory at all of how we extricated ourselves from that meeting, nor of the subsequent visit to the pyramids.
Throughout my time in Egypt I was struck by the uniformity of men's hairstyles: short, parted on the side, moustaches without beards. I couldn't detect the existence of even the most marginal fashion subculture, or of any diversity of taste or manner at all. This impression of homogeneity contrasted with the rich internal lives of the characters in Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk, which I had bought at L'Orientaliste and had been reading during the trip.
At times it struck me that I would have felt I understood things better if I had remained content to read an Egyptian novel or two in Germany. The only encounters I had had in Egypt were these aggressive, almost menacing attempts at immediate friendship on the part of young Egyptian men. I have never been an easy friend to anyone, and I had no point of reference in my previous experience for what they seemed to be proposing.
I was not aware at the time that the superficial impressions I was forming were the superficial impressions of a dictatorship. There ought to be a word for it, oughtn't there: these oppressive regimes that nonetheless manage at the same time to convince Westerners that they stand for nothing so much as fun-and-sun (and perhaps a bit of edifying antiquity). It is interesting that the first two countries to catch fire in the wave of Arab revolutions currently underway, Tunisia and Egypt, are the two that have most successfully coupled base kleptocracy and pseudodemocracy with vapid and lucrative tourism industries.
I realize of course that one should not expect to learn much from the superifical impressions of a young flaneur. But I also think that the respects in which I was wrong might be more revealing than the reports of an expert traveler with some reason to believe he is right. In particular, I think my inability to relate much of what I saw --the desperation, the uniformity-- back to politics resulted from the mystified status of Egypt (like, perhaps, Thailand) in the traveller's imagination (even that of the not-totally-idiotic traveller, the traveller who would really like to learn): the impression based on the richness of antiquity, and sustained by the tourism industry, that the political reality of life in these places is somehow a parallel universe, even a distraction from their deeper nature.
Anyway the stunning revolutionary outburst of the past week has made all that seem more naive than ever before. I imagine it is boys like Hamdi and the kid and the Gizan who are most likely to get hurt by Mubarak's thugs, and that their willingness to throw themselves into such danger is born of the same desperate willingness they had to make friends with me. I am thrilled that they have finally arrived at a moment when their wills can be turned to a better cause.
This new theme feels cold and sterile. Your blog was much nicer to read dipped in warmer friendlier colours.
Posted by: Nikolai Nikola | February 3, 2011 at 05:15 AM