Triumphant Sun, Pt. 10

Evan awoke in near darkness, his disorientation almost complete. He stared at the crazed lines and cracks that cut his ceiling into broken shards of ancient plaster. Outside, the muezzin howled the morning prayer, echoing over the rumbling sounds of the city. As he finished another began, then another and another, tumbling over each other in a patchwork symphony of Quranic verses.

He fumbled at his bedside table for a glass of water, knocking his keys and watch to the floor with a metallic crash. A pervasive fatigue enveloped him as he levered himself to sit on the edge of his bed. The floor felt grainy beneath his bare feet so he shuffled his feet into a pair of beaten rubber slippers. The venetian blinds clattered back and forth in the slight breeze, sending erratic blades of light tumbling across the room, illuminating the dust that hung in the air.

Evan peered out the cramped kitchen window as he made coffee in the Arabic style, letting the powder-like grounds steep slowly in a small tin pot with sugar, cardamom and cinnamon. The window opened onto a peculiar shaft that ran the length of his building, supposedly bringing air to cramped interior rooms. Pipes and byzantine tangles of wiring snaked through it, covered in the sand and dust of forty or fifty years. It all hung together in an “Egyptian fix” – slapped together with whatever came to hand until it broke again, hopefully on someone else’s watch.

Evan closed the window shutter and walked to the balcony of the apartment, cradling the steaming glass of coffee in his hand. The first sip brought him awake and upright, the intensity of the dual flavors of coffee and sugar jolting him out of the morning stupor. He’d had no intention of waking so early, but sometimes he still found himself dragged from sleep by the calling of the muezzins. It was a sound at once ethereal and comfortingly familiar – on a trip across the Mediterranean a few months ago, he’d felt the lack of it every morning.

Minarets jutted out over the city like exclamation points – some mere crumbling towers of shoddy brick, others modern stone edifices and a few, selected examples of medieval Islamic architecture. Cairo earned the epitaph “City of a Thousand Minarets” several times over, but the effect became stranger and more affecting with odd, new juxtapositions. A new phenomenon outnumbered the spires – satellite dishes dotting every rooftop, sometimes clustering together like a growth, sprouting out of the fabric of the city. More popped up every day, tenuously wired and affixed to whatever surface provided a modicum of space.

Many of the buildings were unfinished, too – steel bars twisting up out of the concrete giving the roofs a vicious, unfinished appearance. Builders left them that way to dodge taxes – an incomplete building wouldn’t get taxed by the government. That never stopped squatters from moving out onto the exposed roofs, setting up rambling shanty-towns that collapsed upon themselves with depressing regularity. One of the thousands of forgotten, unimportant scandals that got lost in the wandering streets.

Compare & Contrast

I haven't written in a while...with 4 finals coming up tomorrow, I've been swamped with work. But I had two interesting meetings lately, with two different authors that I've read in my Arabic Literature in Translation class: Sonallah Ibrahim and Gamal al-Ghitani.

Gamal al-Ghitani is a reporter at the newspaper Akhbar al-Yom(News of the Day), and the Editor-in-Chief of Akhbar al-Adab(News of Literature). As such, he's definitely a part of the state apparatus, because there is a lot of governmental censorship and control of the media. His books are still critical of the government, but in subtle, round-about ways - the one we read was called Zayni Barakat and it is about an eponymous 15th-century judge in Mamluk Cairo who is a critical parallel of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Sonallah Ibrahim, on the other hand, is a real rarity in Egypt - a true professional writer. Since books in Egypt are printed in runs of several thousand, it's a hard way to make a living. But he wants to be truly independent from the government and so he has lived a very modest lifestyle, almost below the poverty line(which in Egypt is very low indeed). He was even offered a literary prize by a governmental literary body that included a cash prize of almost $100,000, but he turned it down, saying:

We have no theatre, no cinema, no research, no education. We only have festivals and conferences and a boxful [referring to Egyptian television broadcasting] of lies.

I publicly decline the prize because it is awarded by a government that, in my opinion, lacks the credibility of bestowing it.

I met Ibrahim first, last night at my professor's apartment here on the upper floors of the dorms where many of the teachers live. She has a really amazing place, with a stunning view of Cairo where you can hear all the muezzins calling to prayer at once. Most of our class was there, about 12-14 people, and we asked him some questions and then had dinner and it sort of relaxed into a dinner party. It was quite entertaining and enlightening, and though he spoke softly and alternated between English and Arabic, he was quite an entertaining guy and made a few funny quips - notably, when he heard we were studying Arabic literature, he asked "Why? What do we have worth studying?" He was a very thin, dark, mild-looking man, with an unassuming manner and a big shock of grey curly hair, almost Einsteinish. He also said John Grisham was one of his favorite American authors, although I couldn't tell if he was being tongue-in-cheek.

al-Ghitani couldn't have been more different. We met him at his office this morning in the imposing(for Cairo) main building of Akhbar Al-Yom, and we sat across the desk from him and talked in Arabic and English for a while. He was a much more imposing figure, bigger and more lively and self-confident. His great passion is Islamic Cairo or al-Qahirah al-Qadeema, and he offered to give us tours of it later - unfortunately, he's going to the US and won't be back until I have left. His office was very imposing and official, which seemed appropriate to his relatively "insider" status compared to Ibrahim.

All in all, it was an interesting and educating two days.