Remembering Alex
Posted on July 7th, 2008 in musings and
I’ve finally gotten around to starting No One Sleeps in Alexandria by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, a contemporary novel set in WWII-era Alexandria by (obviously) an Egyptian author. Many of my Egyptian friends and acquaintances highly recommended the book for providing a contrasting view of the the city, one to supplement the colonial perspective that I struggled to deal with during my preparation for and time in Alexandria earlier this year. Once again, literature about and memory of place become emeshed as I read Meguid’s book, and I’m roaming the city in memory along with the characters in the book. Alexandria and my friends there are on my mind. Among the scraps of my digital notes, I found a partial list of “Things Observed and Learned” in Alexandria—more memory:
- Things happen in the street.
- I stand out.
- Animals are butchered, goods bought and sold, teas and coffees drunk, sheeshas smoked.
- Movement in the street is choreographed.
- Pedestrians and autos jockey for position and negotiate their respective itineraries.
- There is a unique language communicated through car horns. (Are there other languages / codes / means of communication between pedestrians?)
- There are few maps of Alexandria and they are not reliable because street names and street directions change.
- The streets are scarred and in disrepair.
- Egyptian men walk arm in arm.
- Many women (but not all) wear head scarves (which is a relatively new development); some wear the burqa.
- The shopping mall is the preferred commercial / social space of the affluent classes. This is the street sanitized and branded.
- The downtown has been relocated to a new “downtown” mall (“City Centre”) that is on the outskirts of the city.
- The Faculty of Art (University of Alexandria) is very conservative and infects its students with a reactionary mentality towards art / artist.
- The old Jewish quarter is on a hill. It is very dense and very poor and very easy to get lost in.
- There are hoards of mangy cats in the streets.
- I saw a dead cat curled up between a gutter and a building.
- Fishmongers sell fish on the side of the street.
- Many buildings in Alexandria are crumbling.
- The city is covered in garbage.
- A constant wind blows into the city from off of the Mediterranean.
- Alexandrians are very friendly and eager to say “hello” to me, the American tourist.
- It costs foreigners LE10 to enter the Library.
- I am paying the price of being a tourist.
- There are beautiful scarves woven of fine Egyptian cotton.
- I was offered hash.
- Iran is not an Arab state.
- Foul is a dish of fava beans mixed with various spices and vegetables.
- Aquafina bottled water is suspected to be straight from the tap.
- Don’t forget the baksheesh (tip).
- Two Egyptian beers: Sakara and Stella.
- There are dead cats all over the city.
- In Alex, cars drive like pedestrians walk in Manhattan.
- A row of several dozen men kneeling to pray on astroturf in the street alongside parked cars.
- A man walks through the streets with a push cart and shouts “bikya!” looking to buy unwanted junk.
- Pedestrians walk equally in sidewalks and in streets.
- Before drinking Turkish coffee, one must wait a few minutes after it is poured to allow the grounds to settle.
- Much of Arabic graffiti on the walls are the name of Allah, Islamic sayings, or scriptures.
I see an interesting connection between this ad hoc list and No One Sleeps in Alexandria: amid the narrative of the city and Magd al-Din, a peasant who brings his wife and child to Alexandria after being exiled from his village, Meguid inserts news-clip fragments that offer a kind of survey of contemporaneous local and global events during the period. Magd al-Din often reads aloud from the newspaper to his friend Dimyan, and these passages intimate Magd al-Din’s interest in the news of the world, but also speak to both the interconnectedness and discursiveness of world events as represented in the pages of newspapers:
[...] Hitler himself went to spend Christmas with his troops on the western front. Everyone wished victory for their peoples and their armies. The Finns will still scoring surprising victories. The League of Nations expelled Russia from its membership. Yusuf Wahbi screened his film Street Children in Cairo, where there was an increase in cases of typhoid fever. Many bottle of cognac, champagne, and whisky were sold in Alexandria, where nightclubs stayed open by candlelight to bid farewell to the old year. [...]
These events mingle with the everday narrative of life in the city, as memory binds the collective and individual together to form the texture of consciousness.
