Cairo Post

Alexandria’s hubristic tagline, ‘gem of the Hellenistic world,’ is more justified by history than by ruins, which are noticeably short in a city running off the sea breeze and an imagination of its busy, layered past. 

It is still a meeting point of religions (ancient Egypt meets ancient Greece and Rome; Coptic Christianity and Islam) whose ancient monuments are a scattered shred of a city whose history includes Alexander the Great and Cleopatra.

Most of ancient, Rome-rivaling Alexandria is under layers of sediment and building, or underwater. The Roman catacombs of Kom Ash-Shuqqafa, discovered in 1900 when the ground gave through for a passing donkey, are most interesting for their Roman-Egyptian wall art – think Anubis in a tunic.

Read the rest of my bit at the Daily Star Egypt.

Protests in downtown Cairo orgainzed by the Kefaya reform movement and opposition political parties against proposed constitutional amendments ended in a forced sit-in of some 200 protesters outside a party headquarters, surrounded by ranks of state security. Over 30 were detained after protests began at 5pm and by 8pm activists gathered outside the Tagammu party building on a narrow side street as rows of uniformed and plainclothes security agents pushed down the one-way side street, blocking the exit, and minor clashses flared. Activists demanded the release of detainees, 12 of whom were released by Friday morning. The rest was just released early this evening.

Here are two reports of the protests that Adam Makary and I did, one for Al Jazeera and one for the Daily Star Egypt.  

From Thursday’s story in the Daily Star Egypt, more photos of the textile factory in the mid-Delta city of Shibin Al-Kom.

The Spinning and Weaving Factory, state-owned until recently sold to an Indian company, which took over operations this past Thursday. We talked to a security guard, quoted  in the story, who eventually led us on a quick tour of a mill.

The first mill, where workers stopped and smiled at our guide, who was head of security.

Walking out of the main gate and down the main street along the factory, we saw a crowd of men walking down the street. Was there going to be a protest? Some anticipation. We walked down toward the crowd, over sticky, newly paved blacktop, and then a loud siren, prison-break-style, went off in the tower. Time for work. It was 3:00, and went off at 3:15. The evening shift, 3-11pm.

Talking to workers on the street, some reluctant, terse, others crowding around to see who we were and what others were telling us. We met one worker who, after talking to Adam for a bit, was leading us down the street, back to the factory and inside through the workers’ entrance, before the main gate.

We criss-crossed through the complex, down big factory roads and mill houses, before going inside one, maybe three or four rows from the main gate. We’d been thinking there wasn’t going to be much of a story, just one security guard and some workers on the street, reluctant. But we were led through rows of spinning machines by a 19-year-employee who only gave his first name, Ashraf, talking to worker after worker on our way to an upstairs office looking over factory floor. We sat and talked to a manager and two other men in the office, and had tea over explanations of their wages - a pound an hour, 8 hours a day, paid each month - and the sale to the Indian company. Then they showed the new working conditions under globalization — one worker to a machine that otherwise had three. Workers gathering in pockets row after row told us how it was impossible for one man to work a machine — “look at him over there, he cannot keep up with the machine.”

Full Story coming today in The Daily Star Egypt. Photos by Frederick Deknatel.

A lot in the village of Temoua, in southern Giza. The main drag of Temoua St., a few blocks away, was lined with about a dozens of state security and police trucks on Saturday afternoon. They arrived sometime in the morning after a gas truck exploded here around 1.30 am. When the government arrived exactly wasn’t clear — on Temoua St. officers said they first arrived soon after the blast, though people in village said no one was there until 11. Three officers on Temoua St. did not know when the rubble would be cleared. Crowds of children in the neighborhood were standing around and playing around the blown-up truck site, kicking gas tanks. One kid picked up the truck’s muffler when I took a photo.

The truck was loaded with hundreds of gas tanks, and Adam Makary was talking to people there who said the gas was for residents to use. First one tank ignited, then another blew — 3 blasts, accorinding to local witnesses. Firas al-Atrqchi, the DSE’s editor, had taken video footage of the blasts from his Maadi apartment window, across the Nile and miles away, having heard the blasts from there. Perhaps I’ll try and post the clip.

The ruined, charred gas truck and tanks littered one end of the muddy lot in Temoua on Saturday afternoon. Across from the rubble, on the two far ends of the lot, two other trucks, also loaded with gas tanks, were parked, apparently moved in that day, according to residents. There is a storage facility near Temoua and other sources said the exploded truck had been parked overnight on its way there. Fortunately no one was hurt, although two similar explosions occurred elsewhere very recently, as our story reports, causing two deaths. 

So when will the rubble be moved? Late last August, my first week in Egypt, I was on a train to Alexandria four days after the major train crash just north of Cairo that killed 58 people, and we passed the wreckage, lying on the side of the tracks.

Some photos that my sister Anna took on her visit to Cairo. She was on her way to the Citadel; I was in Arabic class.  

2008 will be the 50th anniversary of iraq’s revolution, which ended the british hashemite monarchy. if we are to believe david brooks and how he frames iraq’s violent past, then maybe this will be a big moment. undoubtedly it will be commemorated, though how who knows. of course mr. brooks history of iraq, provided in an op-ed 11/00, was a polemic, a quick look at an essay based on british documents and the following summary:
 
"And his is a Gibbonesque tale of horror. There is the endless Shiite-Sunni fighting. There is a massacre of the Assyrians, which is celebrated rapturously in downtown Baghdad. Children are gunned down from airplanes. Tribal wars flare and families are destroyed. A Sunni writer insults the Shiites and the subsequent rioters murder students and policemen. A former prime minister is found on the street by a mob, killed, and his body is reduced to pulp as cars run him over in joyous retribution."

while dismissing a base, unspecified view of iraq as historically violent, the reasons for bringing up history are still there. americans were the first foreign invaders and occupiers of iraq since the british; perhaps george h w bush didn’t order tanks all the way to baghdad because he didn’t want that weight on the us. perhaps george bush sr had a head for history. i could be wrong, but even if that thought crossed his mind only for a moment, that’s more than we can expect from his son. the baseless rhetoric and public talk that america rode into iraq and that continues to propel the war expects little from americans.

americans need not know a history of the modern middle east, shaped by imperialism, zionism, and increasingly since the end of the second world war, american foreign policy. the settlement program begun by israel after the june war in 1967, and supported continuously by every American president since, is only part of the picture on the ground. in the 1980s, america supported Israel’s invasion of lebanon; through the 1990s and into 2000, a perhaps hopeful peace process failed in israel/palestine, not simply because arafat rejected barak’s "generous offer" but because of the flaws of that ungenerous offer. newspapers might have described it generous, but a look at the definitive maps — which no papers provided at the time — revealed the american support for israel confining palestinians to three cantons in the west bank, dissected by israeli roads and settlement blocs. palestine would have been the gaza strip and a broken west bank, behind a expanding, meandering wall, the ‘67 borders constantly being redrawn by settlements.

immediate military aid for israel throughout the second intifida, when the ratio of palestinian and israeli death was near 10 to 1, and the bush administration’s support of increased israeli aggression and settlement expansion under sharon did not disappear as factors on the ground when america began its war on terror. they did not go away when america invaded iraq. when we ask why so much of the middle east is not ‘moderate’ to our liking, why iraqis — thank you mr. brooks — have a historical penchant for being violent, greedy, and against the common good — well, that is when we need to ask other questions. why the american view is so essentialist, casting ‘moderate’ against ‘rogue’ and ‘terror’ against ’security’ in such a way that precludes any real consideration of the place and the increasingly american presence in the region, whether directly in iraq or indirectly along the separation wall, in the grid of new west bank settlements, or in the empty space of a bulldozed palestinian home.

if in 2008 violence in iraq has subsided and the american-catered government can pacify the country, then perhaps the celebration of 1958 will take on a glow of actual progress. if in 2008 we are where we are today, which is fairly close, just worse, than where we were in 2005 and 2004, then 1958 will likely be remembered another way.

if the dates and details actually impress themselves on us, perhaps the totality of american history in the middle east, from the 1950s to the present, will tell us to finally scale back our involvement, to change course, to not push all the way to baghdad, and to try and actually broker even resolution in israel and palestine. maybe when we see the iraqi revolution of 1958 in 2008, we will takes the significance of the moment, which was the collapse of the british system there, and apply it preemptively on the course of american foreign policy.

David came to Egypt for a week, and left last Saturday. I’ve been offline a bit with his visit during ‘Id and midterms the week before to close out Ramadan. We went to the Sinai for a few days, where we lost and then found a passport near Taba after we arrived, and rode in a minibus full of hotel workers for 6 hrs from the Sinai back to Cairo when we left two days later. The details of the ride  boiled down to Khalid, a cab driver who lived at Castle Beach in Ras Shaytan, where we were staying, befriending us, helping us track down David’s passport via cell phone calls to what seems like an expansive network of Sinai cab drivers, and then agreeing to drive us to Cairo. Only, at an exhorbinant price, as he told us on the road. After getting the price down in increments, only to find out that he didn’t really want to drive all the way, and that we didn’t what to drive all the way with him for what he was asking, he arranged for us to overpay still to ride instead in another minibus. It was like any of the minibuses that buzz around Cairo with four full rows of seats and little wheels. Taking digital photos with a little Canon camera in a bus of men who work for a week in Taba for 300 Egytpian pounds, and pay 30 pounds for the ride, didn’t seem appropriate. That David and I had been duped into paying far more than that was not so much a surprise — prices for tourists are always higher, most of all in the Sinai, where on the stretch of beach camps between Taba and Nuweiba, on the border with Israel, cab drivers expect  American dollars. I saw one couple pay with a crisp 100 dollar bill; we only had pounds. 

We went to Giza on David’s last day; my first daytime trip to the Pyramids. It’s a park, really - walk around, and pay to go inside - we climbed a narrow shaft in the Great Pyramid up to the clammy burial chamber - soon you realize that all these old burial holes, or whatever, scattered around the Pyramids and in the sand are full of garbage. The Sound and Light Show stage, and the tourist cafes, face the Pyramids, but across the street there are the stables where you can rent camels and horses, and slums. The contrast is overwhelming but there flocks of people and tourist buses - a road cuts been the two big Pyramids - none of which seems to react. Guides holding laminateed, numbered group signs lead packs of tourists under the Sphinx, trashy looking British and American women huff cigarettes in the sun, their backs to Pyramids, men on camels and horses try to shuffle you on for a ride, best rate, and across the street in the unpaved allies behind KFC poverty Egyptian children wearing old dot-com tee-shirts. Old women sell packs of tissues, and a steady stream of tourists - Egyptians, Americans, Europeans - ride through on horses, on their way to the open desert and the big view of the all the Pyramids.

The Egyptian Museum is a clunker warehouse of a building, stocked full of the kinds of artifacts that glitter and carry a $20 of $50 admission ticket in American and European museums. Some of the works do glitter in Cairo - the jewelry of Queen H and of course the fabled sarcophogi of Tutankhamen, in their air-conditioned, guarded rooms, are what a tourist might expect. Crowds of Germans, Brits, Indians, Americans - ‘look at the detailing? it takes a long time just to build a coffin these days’ - move in slow, frustrated bursts, looking at necklaces, King Tuts outer jeweled sarcophogus, then the innermost one - ‘did it really fit in the other one?’ A British woman noticed that she was taller than the boy king, and ‘probably couldn’t fit’ in the sarcophogus with the famous headdress that’s striped gold and blue.

And while the room of the mummies is also air-conditioned, presenting thousands-years old monarchs in typical enough museum setting - quiet, sneaking cell phone photos, temperature controlled glass cases for the bodies of Ramses II, Seti, and others, including one whose long curly black hair does not hide an enormous head wound (he was a warrior) -  the rest of the museum is, well, a warehouse. Seated statues of all sizes are placed in any corner, along with endless rows of sarcophogi, burial chariots, and in one room, the Greco-Roman mummies from the 2nd century AD, the ones with faded, fresco-style face portraits. The faces look remarkably like modern day Egyptians, a friend said, as we also assumed that one dark bearded portrait must have resembled Jesus. The jewelry room of a Queen H is replicated in any fancy jewelry store here in Cairo.

However much clutter there is in this clunker warehouse of a museum - soon to be moved to new digs out in Giza (like Ramses statue a few weeks ago) - it feels singularly Egyptian, whether in the contemporary faces of the Roman portraits, or by the fact that any American museum would case one of these pieces behind top-of-the-line glass, with a useless, interactive video accompaniment. The copy for the mass of arranged artifacts in the Egyptian Museum, if there is a tag at all, seems purposely vague, sometimes no more than a note in pencil, listing the Pharaonic Dynasty of this headdress, but not the year. But in Egypt, perhaps you’re expected to know that.

Last Saturday, after seeing a Fayrouz-soundtracked dance concert on the war in Lebanon (more to come on that), I packed into a cab with 4 others and went to Giza. We arrived around midnight. After a few unpleasant offers - men running alongside the cab and holding the driver’s side door, shouting in that yes, they could give us horses - we were in a back alley, where there was a stable. I have never been on a horse other than pony rides, but soon 5 of us were trotting through narrow alley ways, past one room houses, resting camels, quiet shisha cafes of old men, and a few kids smoking hash sitting on a dumpster. The Pyramids were in sight after we left the alleys, heading up a trail past an old cemetary and up into the sudden desert. There is a high fence guarding in the protected area of the Pyramids, and we cantered along it, then turned more to the open sand. Our horses started a few brief gallops and the Pyramids loomed in the dark on our right, casting twin shadows even in the dark. The lights of Giza and Cairo stretch in dots all around, and the Pyramids are partially lit. Even from a distance, and in 1am desert dark, they were commanding, though not enough to come out in a photo (though my newest roommate took a long exposure shot that I’ll post later).

We stopped for tea at the top of a large, rockier dune, a planned part of the excusion on the part of our guide, who would ride alongside throwing tiny firecrackers or cracking his wip to make our horses gallop. The were a crowd of rocks and a man boiling hot water and extra sweet mint tea for the various horse riders who come out to the desert late at night. We galloped back across the expanse of desert to the alleyways, a 30 min trip, thereabouts. On the return, I was on a different horse who took off - I was 100 yards or more ahead of everyone else, galloping more than I had on the way to the tea, the Pyramids on my left horizon this time. Cantering hurts - I am still a little soar from all the quick ups and downs - but galloping, you flow more, the horse feels lighter, even if it’s dark and the sand is a little shapeless, and you can’t hold your camera for proof.

I read a lot of David Berman here. This won’t come as a surprise to some. By a lot of David Berman I mean Actual Air, rereading "Classic Water" or "Self-Portrait at 28" and discovering the ones I used to pass over, like "The War in Apartment 1812." I told a cab driver I was from London yesterday, and learned what he had to say of London - "number one" - and then I fumbled something in Arabic about London and Cairo both being very large cities. But usually I learn more about Cairo and Egypt here talking to people than I do about the places I tell them I’m from, unlike this bit from "Self-Portrait at 28."

"It’s one of the little disappointments
that makes you think about getting away,
going to Holly Springs or Coral Gables
and taking a room on the square
with a landlady whose hands are scored
by disinfectant, telling the people you meet
that you are from Alaska, and listen
to what they have to say about Alaska
until you have learned much more about Alaska
than you ever will about Holly Springs or Coral Gables."

Those little disappointments are absent here, then. But I’ll keep telling people I’m from London, or Toronto, or maybe just Boston or New York, to see what I can learn.  

The garment market near Bab’Zuweila.

I told the cab driver "Al Gazira al Wusta" but once we crossed the 6th of October Bridge into Zamalek, I didn’t give any directions. Mostly because I still forget left and right in Arabic, but also because I wanted to see how he’d go. The usual is to go up the right side of the island, up the narrow road along the Nile with fancy apartment buildings with names like "Nile View" and "Soloman House" in Art Deco type. This cab driver went up the left side of Zamalek, first past the Gezira Club - the country club of Zamalek (the former gardens of a queen whose palace is now the Marriott). We turned through narrow streets left and right. I knew we were going north, and I recognized the main road on the left side of Zamalek, along the Nile by Ismail Mohammed, where an ATM stole some of my money last week.

Once we drove past the Vodafone shop and Radioshack, I knew we were close, and finally we passed the little corner floweshop that overcharged me for a big plant I put in my room the other day. I suppose I ignored the price while trying to talk to the flowerman in broken colloquial, with the greetings and biographical questions. "Mr. Frederick" he said, and he gave me a rose. Of course, then again that is standard procedure to a customer who won’t haggle and is about to overpay for a potted plant.

Earlier yesterday I knew it was an especially hot day by the haze/smog out the apartment windows and the totally still Nile. No breeze today. In taxi cabs with only one back window that opens, often, that breeze is help.

I signed up for a class in Middle Eastern Studies with no stated topic or time, professor, location, because I just wanted to get out the International Student Services Office with a schedule intact. Surprise, I was the only one to register for mystery class, which was cancelled to begin with. Quickly jotting down possible courses from a library computer, I found a History seminar on Jordan and the Palestinians. Conversations, signatures, and another pushy meeting in the ISSO, and I was in the class. There is a class trip to Jordan planned for October.

This evening’s sunset from the balcony. Those low houses on the bottom are houseboats, on the bank of the Nile. I’m told the Muslim Brotherhood started in this neighborhood, across the Nile.  

I’ll start with the huge dragonflies outside the window during the day. I thought there was dust on the window when I was going over some of my photos, but they are the packs of dragonflies that twirl outside, seven stories up during the day (see day photos below). The Nile runs to the right below. Since it’s always sunny here the river is always flickering. The dragonflies in the day are always buzzing. Cairo is always busy.

My view in Zamalek is very particular. Quite isolated on the island, being given the ex-pat, embassy, green leaf impression of Cairo. Tahrir Square, where the AUC campus sits split into three, is not far from Zamalek - across to the other bank of the Nile - but the cabs, traffic, smell, and noise seem far away behind my big window to the Nile.

So classes started today - a history course on State and Society in the Middle East: the Ottoman Empire, 1699-1914. A little wide perhaps. Tomorrow morning I’ll go to After Empire: Nationalism and Socialism in the ME from 1914 to the present. I should have the whole period covered, then. Tomorrow I’ll also go to Mod. Standard Arabic and International Politics of the Middle East - the courses don’t here really go for the sexy punch, like at Vassar: "War Talk," "Revolutionary America," "The Environmental Imagination." My final course is only specified "Specific Topic in Mid East Studies," topic, time, and location TBA.

I am nearly done with Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. The romance and rumbling of 1950s Saigon, with the grizzled Brit reporter Fowler clashing with the quiet American idealist Pyle over ideologies and a Vietnamese women are far from Cairo life. Yes, yes,  I know. But Greene’s novels - well, this and reading The End of the Affair in Spain two and half years ago- express at least what I could imagine the most romantic of ex-pat life to be like. Green was good at that. The love, the cynicism, his genuine connection and precise image of a foreign place - reading Greene while traveling, though I am no Roman Catholic, is a trip.

At the end of the day, in a cab back across the Nile.

I moved into an apartment.