“Where they make a desert, they call it peace” Tacitus, The Agricola c.AD 98 I. Suffering economic depression since the 2011 ousting of Hosni Mubarak, Cairo is a dusty sprawl of stern faces, backstreet rubble, incessant exhaust fumes. Quiet despair waits on a million street corners; on the corners of a million hungry mouths: men and women who simply have nothing to do each day, nowhere to go. An uncertain silence hangs over every dusk and dawn. There is nothing new. Only a bitter silence - then bickering, the Adhan, a car horn stirring the dead air, then silence again, dust and bickering and silence. After Mohammad built Cairo he saw what he had done and wept the Nile. On the corners, stray cats scratch Faiyumi bones. And weary young men eat dust under heavy shrouds, packing it into their mouths, mumbling thanks to Allah for the fruits and virgins of the afterlife. Dust and bone and the sour bread of the night. Al-Qahirah, where laughter is forbidden. Al-Qahirah, where the women’s voices bare a furious forlorn sound. Al-Qahirah, where even the water has a taste of misery. Al-Qahirah, who destroyed your life in that corner of the world, so that now you find it in ruins everywhere you go? Dust-shrouded sun. Cold nights of dust and bone and withered teats. A chorus of kneeding mouths. Grapes that died on the vine. Dust and bone, ground for the unleavened daily bread. On earth, as if there were a heaven. Give us this day of life and allow us to trespass and trick those who conspire against us. Dust and bone of a sterile wind, crossing the dry plains north, east from Giza, Imbabah, Kirdasa; hollow wind, whose shadows lift a dead song out from under the sea. Al-Qahirah! Strange sea of your eyes, dead but for the smoke and misery. Mouths sealed with rust and spittle. Faded minarets where cockroaches crawl among a wasteland of broken splendours. Heavy-eyed merchants, wringing their hands like flies on a turd! Al-Qahirah, what will be left of you? The old ghosts of departed lovers, hungry and bereft they leant helpless into the cold dark night and fled to Alexandria, Mansoura, Damietta, where they prayed to a pale empty sky, cursed the Fellahin ruins of time, left you to shiver in the dust, in the shadow of the old north wind alone. Al-Qahirah, land of endless waiting; land of faded grandeur and hungry ghosts; land of destitution and bitter winds; land of wretched husks and an ancient restless agony; land of broken spirits where nothing reaches the senses for days; where, finally, a sorrowful sound catches the ear: the sadness at the dark heart of the sun, each generation consuming the last, like a serpent consuming its own tail for eternity and calling it love. It's all the same thing: the echo of a lonesome song from a horse-cart; a violin rising from a backstreet basement window; an old man sighing on the corner; that thing that makes bakers rise earlier than monks and makes the stray cats fight all night - all the calls and cries and conversations pass me by like a distant murmur on the cold north wind of time. II. Laying there, anaesthetised on her heavy black breast, she tells you harshly "sleep now" with that same mother-in-waiting tenderness of all African women everywhere - the sound of it almost reaches the shoreline of your dream. Lying there for hours in each other's arms, having found the sweetest most delicious thing in life together, stranded within one another like lambs curled up beneath the sheets of time and, later, still warm with it, you walk out through the cold subterranean dust, the midnight streets alone, passing the neon cafes blurred conversations of all the world's night-weary heaven-going street-dwelling beat-up old desolate angels of time. And the air in old al-Qahirah so bitter and strange you feel it could be any city anywhere in the world, littered with a million husks of lovelorn lovesick love-bedraggled flesh; dreaming of handshakes and riches and the taste of tomorrow's unleavened dust; dreaming of papers and appointments and this tiresome Fellahin sorrow that all of mankind is shuffling through vaulted in this old brown earth alone. III. Yet you know that it's not all wasted – that, like the earth itself, we have our seasons, our rhythms, that we are afforded the chance of reprieve, hope, human endeavour, call it what you will. But after living in Cairo for 40 days and 40 nights, desolation is all Abraham saw, nothing that does not speak with the same empty voice of bitter dust and defaced firmament. So you become indifferent. You walk close by to life, and at the same time elsewhere. Your heart shies from the sorrow. You remember your thrownness. Pointless tears knot your throat. Moonlight frays your corduroy shoulders. You see misery in every ruined face, in every desperate word, on every fecund corner of this living ruin - it's there plain to see, in the way people look, sentencing you with a single gaze. It's all the same: a loaf of bread is a grain of sand: old Al-Qahirah, where there is only the sound of sorrow when people appear to be making love: hungry ghosts whose ex-static cries are the cries of sorrow itself - it never ends. The wind carries the sound of it out towards Jerusalem. And sometimes it’s as though everything else is just a veil for what that sound means. 2018 IV. Wringing their hands like flies in the market, rows replace reason, life one long negotiation, a series of power games on the streets in the marketplace bartering exhorting shaking hands, disguised for a few moments by the opening gambit of pious mumblings, then it all starts up again: the endless clamour of negotiating confrontation explaining imploring, everything treated with suspicion and mistrust, as it should be… dark eyes weary from years of consternation, pleading gestures of anger, crazed heavy eyes, imploring threats, it never stops no pause for breath, time, acceptance. Despite placing such a high value on civil order, it is also their downfall: unable as a society to separate tradition from superstition, culture from obsolete behaviours, antiques from ciphers. It is impossible, entirely pointless, to try and engage such a person in conversation about religion or culture or anything else, as they are unwilling to listen, unable to process new ideas, and above all obstinately uninterested in change. 2021
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AuthorEnglish teacher from the UK. Living in Granada. Currently working in Doha. Archives
February 2022
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