Shelf Life Page 4
Like many Egyptians who went to foreign-language schools, Hind and I learned and read in a language other than Arabic. Complicated and inaccessible, classical Arabic left us linguistically orphaned; English adopted us, and we accepted all too gladly. My parents insisted we speak and write the three languages of Egypt’s more recent colonial history: Arabic, English, and French. Aware of the advantages of learning the English language—which they both did in adulthood—my parents were nonetheless unwilling to sacrifice their mother tongue or sentence their daughters to a life of linguistic migration. When I was ten years old, they enlisted the help of Abla Nabeeha, a retired Arabic teacher in her seventies, who once a week attempted to instill in us the values of classical Arabic grammar. I saw this as an opportunity to consume more chocolate sables from Simonds, the timeless patisserie on 26th of July Street, which my mother brought in with tea within ten minutes of the tutor’s arrival. Abla Nabeeha smelled of patience and medicine. Her heavy breasts drooped down onto an equally generous belly, which gave way to large hips. Her calves and ankles were always swollen. When she sat in the chair adjacent to mine, I noticed the tops of her socks drawing a deep indentation across her knees. She was kind to me; Arabic was not.
Fus’ha, classical Arabic, is written but seldom spoken. It is dead, what Toni Morrison calls an “unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis.” It is riddled with rules that cover all grammatical formulations and leave little room for playfulness or mistakes. Hind, charmed by words and their usages, urged me to pursue the beauty beneath the rules; I couldn’t see beyond the constraints. Fus’ha is the mother of all Arabic dialects, bringing forth a progeny so varied across the Arab world that different regions struggle to understand dialects other than their own. ‘Amiyya, vernacular or colloquial Arabic, the bastard child of Fus’ha, is the exception. It’s the language of Egypt’s monumental film industry, and the reason for Egyptian Arabic’s popularity throughout the region. Despite the widespread use of ‘Amiyya on-screen and in life, until recently, most books were written in Fus’ha. Egyptians were torn between both languages. Readers fell through the cracks.
As young adults, Hind and I, natives who had a complicated relationship with our mother tongue, had become aware of our dislocation from our motherland. With our newfound freedom, we spent our university years in search of our country and ourselves. Hind studied political science and read Arabic literature for fun. I studied English and comparative literature. Outside class, we discovered unfamiliar parts of the city brimming with new life—repurposed buildings and alleyways, flea markets, used-book markets, music festivals, and fringe theater. Our search for a deeper sense of origin, and what we encountered en route, would be integral to Diwan. It quickly became apparent that many of Diwan’s readers were similarly dislocated from their roots and lost in linguistic migration. We didn’t want to punish them; we wanted to invite them in.
* * *
Egypt Essentials began with the obvious: books about ancient Egypt, from coffee-table books, to mini guidebooks covering specific monuments or areas, to fiction. Wilbur Smith, the Zambian author, took center stage. His sales worldwide were eclipsed by mystery and thriller writers like John Grisham and Stephen King, but in Diwan, he had a devout following of ancient-Egyptophiles. His book covers bear images of pyramids, camels, and sunsets. Kings and kingdoms are narrated through the eyes of Taita, a clever and ambitious eunuch, ex-slave, general, and adviser to the pharaoh. Before this, my knowledge of my ancestors had been limited to broad strokes: seven millennia, a handful of gods, leading characters like Ramesses II, Hatshepsut, and the trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, accompanied by temples, scribes, and hieroglyphics. I knew the importance of death and the afterlife. I had no knowledge of how my ancestors lived, baked, farmed, or loved.
Both masters and beneficiaries of cultural colonialism, the French have their own ancient-Egyptophile: Christian Jacq, a bestselling author and Egyptologist. Diwan’s readers of English and French literature gorged themselves on his books. In my attempt to understand our customers, I read through one of his most popular series, The Stone of Light, which takes place in Upper Egypt on the west bank of the Nile River, home to the artisans working on tombs in the nearby Valley of the Kings. I was struck by his level of detail, which distinguishes his writing from his less academic counterparts, as he weaves real figures and historical events into his fictional worlds.
My reliance upon a Frenchman to elucidate my own history underlines an uncomfortable fact: with some exceptions, Egyptians seldom write novels set in ancient Egypt. There’s a double irony in the way that colonialism first severs us from our past and then forces us to turn to the colonizers for knowledge of that very past. Westerners created Egyptology, then taught it to the Egyptians. It’s like the Antiquities Service, a government program started in mid-nineteenth-century Egypt ostensibly to control the trade of Egyptian artifacts. It actually acted as an extension of neocolonialism: the program was headed by French scholars, and most Egyptian archaeologists weren’t even granted permission to excavate in their own country. An Egyptian wasn’t appointed to run the program until the 1950s. As an adult, I finally saw the bust of Nefertiti—at the Neues Museum in Berlin. The British Museum has the Rosetta Stone (and over fifty thousand other ancient Egyptian objects, making it the largest collection outside of Egypt) and still refuses to repatriate it. Bastards.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder how our reliance on imported knowledge limits our ability to imagine. Are colonized cultures so accustomed to being othered that we unquestioningly accept that knowledge as a gift, never thinking of veracity or reciprocity? Eastern writers don’t narrate Western experience as much as Western writers narrate Eastern experience. Who owns the past: the creators of its narratives, or their consumers? Is it writers or readers who are responsible for filling in the gaps left by colonial estrangement?
* * *
“I can’t find Christian Jacq’s Champollion l’égyptien,” Dr. Medhat, a distinguished ginger-haired, blue-eyed older gentleman, and one of my regulars, said one afternoon. “Do you have it in stock? It’s not on the shelves.” He removed his brown horn-rimmed glasses, befuddled. His desperation reminded me of when my twelve-year-old self would finish one Agatha Christie mystery and urgently seek out the next one. I walked toward the computer terminal near the café, knowing that to double-check the shelves would be taken as a slight by Dr. Medhat. He followed me, saying, “You should read these books.” I stared intently into the screen. He mistook my silence for interest. “Getting to know ancient Egypt teaches me so much about our Egypt today. Did you know that the term ‘reinvent the wheel’ refers to us?” I gave him an incredulous look, as he continued with glee. “Yes, they invented the wheel in one dynasty, then the technology was lost over time, and they ended up reinventing it centuries later.” His charming anecdote went against my (admittedly limited) knowledge.
“Doesn’t that seem a little out of character? The ancient Egyptians were manic about writing things down. Look at the magic spells, wills, medical procedures, and tax records that scribes documented; we take after them in our love for minutiae and bureaucracy,” I replied.
“You have a point, but of the wheel issue, I’m certain.” His hands descended deeper into his pockets, as if anchoring himself into the ground. He looked around, his eyes landing on a nearby table of new releases, including Alaa Al-Aswany’s collection of Arabic short stories Friendly Fire. Its prominent cover, depicting a row of ancient Egyptian figures facing a can of Flit insecticide, elicited Dr. Medhat’s less friendly fire. “What impudence! How dare he insult our glorious past? Our fall from grandeur to decadence, c’est trop!” He paced around the table, flustered.
“I don’t think Dr. Aswany means any harm. He’s merely suggesting that we stop basking in our glorious past and focus on improving our present. We’ve become victims of our pyramid schemes: we swallow the feel-good pill of ‘we built the pyramids’ while our house crumbles around us
.” I flashed him my most engaging grin. My father taught me that I could get away with saying anything to anyone, as long as I did it with a smile. “Is it acceptable that the descendants of the people who built the pyramids are now living in redbrick monstrosities?”
“But even Plato believed that when compared to the Egyptians, the Greeks were nothing more than childish mathematicians,” he proclaimed with renewed fervor.
“It’s good to see you, Dr. Medhat. Customer services will call you as soon as Champollion l’égyptien arrives,” I concluded with another smile.
The conversation stuck with me. His patriotism, and his reading habits, seemed to further derail him from the very knowledge he sought out. Or maybe it was his disappointment with the last fifty years of government failure. But history is a living thing, subject to interpretation. And so is literature. Knowing why we read, what urges it satisfies—to escape, to connect with a past that was concealed from us, to rekindle nationalist pride—may help. But perhaps questioning how we read is more important. Insight rises out of discomfort, and I doubted Dr. Medhat’s capacity for discomfort.
* * *
As we continued to develop Egypt Essentials, we stocked books covering the saints, monasteries, art, and civilization of the Coptic period. Spanning from the third to the seventh centuries, this period witnessed the cultural shift from ancient Egyptian religious practices to Coptic Christianity, a movement whose contemporary followers constitute the largest Christian population in the country. Still, the books elicited some distasteful comments.
“Customers complain that we have too many books about Copts, and not enough about Muslims,” said Hossam, one of my least favorite customer-service employees, a characteristic blob of saliva trapped in the corner of his mouth.
“Whether these are the opinions of customers, or just yours, we are each entitled to our own. Here’s mine: ‘Too many’ as opposed to what? Christianity came to Egypt in AD 33. The word ‘Copt’ comes from the word for ‘Egyptian’ in Greek. The ancient Egyptians were conquered by the Hyksos, Nubians, Assyrians, Libyans, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. The Copts are probably their closest descendants. As for the Muslims, remind me again, when did Islam make it to our part of the world?” I walked away to cool off.
There was so much more that I wanted to say to Hossam, but I’d had this discussion enough times to know that arguing wouldn’t help. Though his remark may seem innocuous, it reveals a gap in our cultural understanding: a craving for Islamic hegemony that engenders a complete denial of difference, and of history itself. The Islamic conquest of Roman Egypt occurred around AD 640 under the military leader ‘Amr ibn Al-‘As. After a few years of sieges and battles, Egypt fell, and gradual, state-sanctioned Islamization began. First came the gizya, a heavy tax levied on those who refused to convert to Islam. Language followed: Arabic replaced Coptic and Greek (the languages of the Greek and Roman occupations of Egypt) as the dominant vernacular, then it became the language of the nation by law. In 1919, Egyptian revolutionaries used the symbols of the crescent and the cross in the streets to signify unity against British colonial occupation. From 1923 to 1953, Egypt’s flag was a crescent with three five-pointed stars. The crescent was said to symbolize Islam; the three stars were interpreted as either the three lands of Egypt, Nubia, and Sudan, or the three faiths of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, peacefully coexisting. Still, people like Hossam were threatened by minority non-Muslim denominations, even though one in every ten Egyptians is a Copt.
The tension strikes a personal chord. I grew up with the promise of solidarity and unity. My mother was Coptic and my father was Muslim. They narrated history as a long arc, teaching Arabic, French, and English not as inherently dominant languages but as recent manifestations of a long series of conquests of Egypt spanning millennia. It wasn’t personal, just colonial. But in recent decades, acceptance of otherness and tolerance of religious difference seem to have faded. I wonder if tolerance is learned, like reading—a habit ingrained in Hind and me from a young age. Perhaps others lack the privilege.
* * *
Cairo’s and Alexandria’s cosmopolitan histories, the indispensable influence of its Greek, Armenian, Italian, and French populations, came to life in Egypt Essentials. Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit tells the tale of her Jewish family and their exodus from Egypt as a result of Nasser’s post-1956 purges of foreigners. Colette Rossant’s Apricots on the Nile: A Memoir with Recipes captures her upbringing in an Egyptian Jewish family during Cairo’s war years. In her portrait of 1930s and ’40s Egypt, Oleander, Jacaranda, Penelope Lively narrates her experiences of Cairo life through the eyes of the colonizer’s child. As a British girl, she admires the freedom of barefoot peasant children, the significance of their poverty lost on her. These knotty memoirs are reflective without succumbing to nostalgia. They multiply, and complicate, stories of nationhood. I hoped the wide range of voices would shift (even slightly) the mindsets of readers like Hossam by encouraging them to sit in discomfort and listen.
And when we did Islam, we did it Diwan-style. We rejected religious polemics. We did not stock texts about ahadith, sayings of the Prophet, or the different schools of Islamic jurisprudence that besieged existing bookstores. Instead, we sold books about mulids, festivals celebrating the births of saints, Sufism, poetry, calligraphy, architecture, and the artistry of woodwork, carpets, and pottery. We challenged ourselves and others to read history as a changing entity, rather than a lifeless, linear record. We presented and lobbied for a study in fragments of a history in fragments.
Then, we plucked from gardens farther away: books of Egyptian proverbs whose titles were quirky literal English translations of popular idioms: The Son of a Duck Is a Floater. Unload Your Own Donkey. Apricots Tomorrow. There was a disarming simplicity in their delivery of tried-and-true outcomes. The collected sayings were a kind of popular archive, carrying wisdom across generations. Written and spoken in the colloquial Arabic of the masses and then translated into English, the sayings in these volumes were accessible to a broad spectrum of readers. But as literal translations, without cultural context, they were charmingly nonsensical. Crossing between languages gave them a grittiness and friction. Their texture transcended the axiomatic, becoming a sort of truth in itself.
As Hind, Nihal, and I considered the section we’d created, we knew it wasn’t complete without the works of Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt’s Nobel laureate and the author of The Cairo Trilogy. When Mahfouz’s novels arrived in the store, Ahmed, a born salesman and my favorite bookseller, with his tidy appearance, engaging smile, and quick learning, arranged them in alphabetical order. I walked up behind him, surveying his work. Without turning, as if addressing the shelves, he asked me why Youssef Idris wasn’t included in the section.
“Personally, Ahmed, he is one of my favorite authors. He was one of the four Arab contenders for the Nobel Prize, but he didn’t get it.”
“Why?”
“Denys Johnson-Davies, the leading translator of Arabic literature at the time, said that he wasn’t translated widely enough into French and English; others said that he was a master of the short story, and the Swedes preferred novels.”
“That’s not fair.”
“My aunt makes the best basboussa in the world, but Tseppas has a chain of shops where they sell their soulless version. It’s not about fairness, it’s about reach.” Ahmed nodded in acknowledgment, knowing our conversation was over. (In truth, my aunt’s basboussa sucked. I’d borrowed the analogy from Ziad, one of our five business partners, who’d used it many times to shut me up. Ziad is notable for many reasons, including the fact that he’s the only person I’ve ever met who’s never once uttered a swear word. I made a bet with Hind that one day his decorum will fracture and he’ll release a filthy torrent of invective. Luckily for me, the bet doesn’t have a deadline.)
* * *
Translation is essential. Access to translated literature nourishes and affirms the imagination. It’s perhaps e
ven more important to authors writing in languages other than English who hope to enter the mainstream, like Youssef Idris and Naguib Mahfouz. Denys Johnson-Davies was credited with saving Alifa Rifaat’s short stories from the ashes of perdition. I’ve witnessed too many books poorly translated and thus condemned to linguistic purgatory.
Ahmed’s question about Youssef’s absence helped to clarify the format of Egypt Essentials. It must be fluid. I envisioned it as an extension of my own family’s habits. Ours is an open house: family members congregate every Friday for lunch, and we invite friends to join as guests at our table on a revolving basis. I reminded myself that the section, and Diwan itself, couldn’t encompass all that’s been written about Egypt. We were cubists, offering varied perspectives and angles from which to view the same subject. These books gave readers the chance to create their own literary experiences: the meeting of the writer, the reader, and the historical moment when the act of reading takes place. No two readers will ever read the same book in the same way.
For an economic perspective, we ordered Galal Amin’s Arabic bestseller, and its English translation, Whatever Happened to the Egyptians? I’d known Dr. Galal when I was a student at the American University in Cairo, where I attended his lectures. I can vividly recall his robust, jovial figure standing at the podium, his sky-high hair and his observant eyes. As students asked questions, he’d rest his fingers in a circle on his forehead. He’d explain our nation’s recent history, how mightily we’d fallen from our ancient status as builders of pyramids and inventors of mathematics, irrigation, and astronomy, intermittently chuckling as he spoke. The more provocative his answer, the greater his mirth. He followed the wild success of his first book with an additional account: Whatever Else Happened to the Egyptians?