Shelf Life Page 5
Dr. Galal—I could never bring myself to omit his title, even after graduating—spoke of an Egypt on the brink of attrition. Through eclectic histories, including of the television, the telephone, romance, birthdays, the circus, and the train, he examined a country shaped by socioeconomic forces. When he visited Diwan well after the 2011 revolution, I suggested a title for another book in the series. He leaned in inquisitively, tilting his ear toward me. I whispered, “What the Fuck Else Can Happen to the Egyptians?” He threw his head back in a guffaw. That was our last interaction; he died in September 2018.
In “This World and the Next,” the last chapter of the second book in the series, he quotes from a speech his father, a notable academic, gave when he was a schoolboy, about how religion enforces a culture of resignation, precluding political and social progress by encouraging us to take comfort in the afterlife. Does the ancient Egyptian obsession with death come from a similar dynamic? Our ancestors built pyramids to house and honor their deceased. They wrote The Egyptian Book of the Dead (a generic name for manuals of spells said to help souls navigate the afterlife). Contemporary Egyptians don’t have the same level of interest or comfort in writing or reading about death, although the way both Muslims and Christians handle death originates from the rituals of ancient Egyptians. The forty-day timeline recurs. For my ancestors, this was the time allotted to the first phase of mummification (dehydration). For Muslims and Copts today, forty days marks the mourning period, during which close female relatives wear black. On the fortieth day, they hold a day of mourning and remembrance. In the seventeenth century, forty days—the etymology of the word “quarantine”—was the period of time a ship suspected of carrying disease or plague was kept in isolation.
* * *
A few shelves below Dr. Galal, browsing visitors would find Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, an iconic murder mystery set in the 1930s between Cairo and Upper Egypt. Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective, finds himself on a luxurious Nile cruise with a curious cast of characters. One of them, an American heiress, is murdered. Poirot and his sidekick, Colonel Race, investigate their fellow travelers, every one of whom seems to have sufficient motive. It joined the category of Egypt Essentials as a visitor, not a family member. Mystery, like fantasy and science fiction, got little traction in the early 2000s with Arab readers, unlike the more popular genres: literary fiction, history and politics, biography, and poetry. Death on the Nile was the exception. It reeled in Diwan’s customers, nostalgic for the exotic 1930s Egypt of their parents’ and grandparents’ stories.
Nostalgia, a permanent resident in the hearts of so many Egyptians, sells books. Minou always chided me about the books we sold in her bags. The bodice rippers, whose damsels in distress needed to be saved by chiseled heroes. The self-help manuals. The dating guides. Any books, really, that ignored the violence of white men. Of course she disapproved of the photographic books that gazed longingly at Egypt’s landscape, as colonizers once had. As usual, I ignored her. I stocked Alain Blottière’s Vintage Egypt: Cruising the Nile in the Golden Age of Travel and Andrew Humphreys’s Grand Hotels of Egypt and its follow-up, On the Nile in the Golden Age of Travel in Egypt Essentials, because I knew they’d sell. These collections cataloged the storied visitors of yore who’d traveled to Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Amelia Edwards, Rudyard Kipling, Florence Nightingale, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jean Cocteau—what they did and where they stayed. Thousands of foreigners packed their fantasies and set sail for Egypt’s shores every year, intermingling with the already Westernized Egyptian upper class and the Europeans who had made Cairo and Alexandria home. Shops and restaurants opened to cater to their opulent tastes. They took photographs, too: riding camels through the desert, racing in a Bugatti at the foot of the pyramids, sipping tea at the Mena House Hotel, and cruising down the Nile on a steam dahabeya.
As a young teenager, I borrowed Agatha Christie’s novels from the All Saints Cathedral lending library. When I realized that she had died a decade beforehand, I was suddenly overwhelmed with grief for the mortal lives of writers. I resolved to read everything she had ever written. This incited my lifelong habit of hoarding books and building libraries. And Death on the Nile remains my favorite of hers. As an Egyptian in a school that was unapologetic in its British supremacy, I felt proud that Agatha had deemed Upper Egypt a worthy setting. I was twelve years old. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was only nine, and, I would later learn, still writing stories in which white characters ate apples, drank ginger beer, and played in the snow—all elements from the English-language stories she read, all absent from her Nigerian reality. Decades later, I heard her speak about “the danger of a single story” with intimate recognition. Being educated outside of my mother tongue led me to believe that Egypt, and Egyptians, couldn’t exist in white people’s literature, because their literature did not belong to us, and ours used to be of no interest to them.
* * *
Tourists shopping at Diwan purchased a copy of Death on the Nile, and often excitedly shared their plans for embarking on a Nile cruise. They would sit on the veranda of the Cataract Hotel, posing as Hercule Poirot and Colonel Race. They would walk past the suite Agatha once stayed in, which carries her name. I smiled at the quaint reenactments these tourists performed. As children, Hind and I had accompanied our mother on the same mission to Aswan, a prominent city on the southern part of the Nile River. She wanted to acquaint us with our ancient past, to share an intimate experience, and to instill pride in our collective legacy. Later, I took my daughters, Zein, then ten, and Layla, eight, on the same trip. We sat in the shade of the Cataract Hotel’s veranda, as Agatha, her sleuths, and countless tourists had, watching the sun’s glow on the Nile. I explained that the ancient Egyptians worshipped the sun as a trinity: heat, rays, and essence. Nodding, my daughters sipped their lemonades. I picked up my bottle of Sakara Gold, printed with the image of the step pyramid of Saqqara, refilling my glass.
Finally, I suggested we watch the film adaptation of Death on the Nile. I’d first seen it in the mid-1980s on our new VHS player. I remembered the cardboard cover of the tape showing Peter Ustinov as Poirot, staring out into the horizon, framed by the imposing figure of the Sphinx. The background was Hollywood’s reductive take on the essence of Egypt: a pyramid, feluccas adrift on the Nile, and the paddle steamer SS Memnon (built for Thomas Cook in 1904). The faces of the cast perforated the border of the image: Bette Davis, Mia Farrow, Angela Lansbury, David Niven, Maggie Smith, Sam Wanamaker. They came to Egypt, stayed at the Cataract, and filmed at the Giza pyramids and in Luxor’s temples. My daughters had never heard of any of these Hollywood stars. That familiar childhood uncertainty of my culture’s worthiness rose from deep inside me, this time in defense of the Hollywood greats I had watched with my parents. I pulled out my phone and looked up the movie, trying to find a hook that would capture their attention.
“Wayne Sleep choreographed the tango,” I announced with excitement.
“What’s a tango?” asked an uninterested Zein.
“Who’s Wayne Sleep?” chimed in Layla, playing along.
“They would start makeup at four a.m. to avoid filming at midday when the sun was fifty-four degrees centigrade.” They were silent. “Even though this was filmed in the late 1970s, they wanted to give it a 1930s feel.”
“Mom, no disrespect, but is there a more modern version? Something with Lara Croft, maybe?”
“Fuck you and fuck Lara Croft,” I snapped, defeated. Maybe the internet gave them a mobility that made questions of belonging and worthiness obsolete. They were raised in a generation that wasn’t forced to encounter the politics of cultural denigration and hierarchy. Theirs was a world that existed only in the present, unburdened by whatever came before. Their lives had a kind of neatness: curated, digitized, filtered.
* * *
Diwan shared my daughters’ globalist upbringing. Most of the English-language books we sold traveled from distant lands, tour
ists who never returned to their home countries. We ordered them from the United Kingdom and the United States via an intricate web of international sales representatives, and then consolidated them in storage facilities. Once we reached cost-efficient quota, these books crossed land and water to reach either Cairo’s airport or the port in Alexandria. There, they had their first encounter with red tape, pink slips, and illegible blue ink, passing through customs and censorship. Then hundreds of cardboard boxes arrived at Diwan’s warehouse to be ripped open, their contents security-tagged, bar-coded, and priced. These imported titles commanded hefty prices compared to their native counterparts, Arabic books from local publishers. An average Egyptian novel was priced at 20 Egyptian pounds in the early 2000s, while Death on the Nile retailed for $8.99 and sold for 54 Egyptian pounds, which became a staggering 162 pounds after the devaluation of the Egyptian pound in November 2016. A mounting crescendo of emails, negotiations, and arguments over discounts, net prices, and short ships—bookseller lingo for discrepancies between packages and attached invoices—accompanied every shipment. Even more trying was the length of this cycle: from ordering to stacking, a title could take between four weeks and four months before finding itself comfortably resting on one of Diwan’s shelves.
When these books finally reached their destination, I treated them with the kindness granted to weary travelers. I created intricate displays, where contrasting arrangements of books participated in lively conversation. Bookselling, too, is a dialogue, and as with every dialogue, there are people who drive it, participate in it, interrupt it, or simply eavesdrop on it. Booksellers transcend their job titles, shifting between roles to act as guardians, matchmakers, and the devisers and detectors of trends.
* * *
Perhaps reading is like traveling. We go to distant lands to understand difference. In doing so, we meet ourselves, the filter through which experience passes, as through a camera’s lens. One of my favorite portraits of Egypt comes from Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club. Written in English and published in 1964, the story takes place during Nasser’s rule. Ram, the privileged Egyptian narrator, has just returned from England to an Egypt he struggles to understand. Ram is loosely modeled on the author himself, who died by suicide five years after the book’s publication. Initially hailed as a masterpiece in the literature of emigration, the book was forgotten for decades, then republished twenty years after going out of print. Like other books in Egypt Essentials, Beer in the Snooker Club blurred the borders we imagine between countries. Waguih, describing his Egyptian homeland in English, feels no compulsion to explain Egypt. Instead, he speaks to an experience shared among readers: a desire to belong and a fear of leaving oneself behind.
Waguih’s Egypt recalls the stories my mother told me growing up. She described afternoon teas at Groppi, Cairo’s premier restaurant, tearoom, patisserie, and deli, where she and her family consumed ice cream in the summer and exquisite gateaux in the winter—the same restaurant where Waguih’s narrator, Ram, meets friends for whiskey. My mother and Ram rode the same tram from Zamalek to the pyramids, the number 15 that once passed in front of the Baehler mansions on what was then Fouad I Street. She traveled within Cairo by bus or tram, and took the train to other cities. All had first- and second-class carriages. Today, public transportation is only used by those who cannot afford the necessary luxury of a car.
In our English-language sections, there were two main types of bestsellers: the current releases, carried over from The New York Times or London’s Sunday Times, and the time-worn classics, most of which had some connection to Egypt, like Death on the Nile and Beer in the Snooker Club. Even my local customers bought these books, as if eager to see themselves. I get it. I feel proud of Egypt’s rise to international prominence. But the pleasure is bittersweet. When your Arabic fluency has been suppressed by years of education in English and French, then a glimpse of Egypt’s soul—a promise of reclamation and redemption—may be accessible only through someone else’s words.
Egypt Essentials was a small section that posed a series of questions without claiming to answer them. Searching for something, I gathered images of my home in one place. Our eclectic collection introduced the colonizer to the colonized, the historians to the novelists, the locals to the outsiders. Competing realities existed side by side in competing Egypts—extreme conservatism and a liberalism devoid of roots, offensive poverty and even more offensive wealth. They always have, and they always will. In my memories, as in Cairo’s streets, the present never fully overthrows the past, nor do the two coalesce. Like bickering neighbors, they delight in existing side by side in joint discord.
3
COOKERY
Though cookbooks took up only one wall in Diwan’s café, they had a far greater significance in our lives than their modest display implied. To create the English cookery section (Hind presided over its Arabic counterpart), I consulted family and friends. I asked them to share their favorites: Julia Child, Mary Berry, Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver, Ina Garten, Madhur Jaffrey, and Ken Hom. The anomalies were The Momo Cookbook and the River Cafe series, which signaled the shift from individual celebrity chefs to more diffuse celebrity restaurant brands. My mother was mortified by the absence of Larousse Gastronomique. Though I was skeptical, I remedied the oversight, only to discover that it became a steady seller, despite its girth and stringent instructions. Once I’d struck a balance between various flavors, styles, and movements, I attempted to infuse the canonical with the local.
As I began to research Middle Eastern and Egyptian cooking, Claudia Roden emerged as queen. Born in Egypt in 1936, she launched her career with A Book of Middle Eastern Food and has reigned supreme ever since. The language of her titles reflected her singular command over our cuisine, from Claudia Roden’s Invitation to Mediterranean Cooking and Claudia Roden’s Foolproof Mediterranean Cooking to the more poetic Tamarind and Saffron: Favorite Recipes from the Middle East. Though some Egyptians were happy enough to claim her as our culinary ambassador, she’d never dedicated an entire cookbook to Egyptian cooking. Instead, she blended all countries of the region into one multinational tagine.
My search for an Egyptian-specific cookbook in English yielded a single title, Samia Abdennour’s 1985 Egyptian Cooking: A Practical Guide. Meanwhile, cooking began to inflect other genres, spilling into memoirs and biographies, beginning with Colette Rossant’s Apricots on the Nile, in the Egypt Essentials section. I recognized the tastes and smells of the author’s childhood. I craved more. In 2006, Magda Mehdawy’s My Egyptian Grandmother’s Kitchen arrived. Alongside family recipes and oral histories, she described winemaking techniques of the ancient Egyptians, offered cultural explanations and anecdotes, and set menus for specific feasts.
Celebrations are defined by what we consume in their honor. Sham el Nessim (literally “the smelling of the breeze”), observed by Egyptians since 2700 BC, marks the coming of spring. We picnic on feseekh, ringa, eggs, and spring onions. This always takes place the day after Coptic Easter, but it is observed by all Egyptians regardless of affiliation. On Eid al-Adha, Muslims honor the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son to obey the will of God, who provided a lamb to be slaughtered in his son’s place. At dawn, following Eid prayers, lambs across Egypt are sacrificed, their meat divided into thirds: one for the family, one for friends and relatives, and one for the poor.
Though our cuisine is inextricable from our culture, I still struggled to find Egyptian cookbooks. Dissatisfied with my meager results, I asked my mother, a spectacular cook, where her culinary prowess came from.
“I used to watch your father cook. He had his specialties—leg of lamb with cinnamon and juniper, pickled cucumbers and turnips, his fuul with tehina.”
“But when you first got married—”
“I just had one cookbook: Abla Nazeera. It was essential, part of every bride’s trousseau, including those of my friends,” she recalled. “I had one friend who used Abla Nazeera’s cookbook but claimed not to.
Another friend was cunning in a different way. Whenever I asked her for a recipe, she would share it in exquisite detail, but then I realized that she always withheld one essential ingredient, so no one’s dishes would be as good as hers.”
“Smart woman.”
“Only while she had us fooled,” my mother countered.
* * *
Nazeera Nicola (her surname is pronounced Na’ula in Arabic) was affectionately known by generations of Egyptian and Arab women as Abla (“teacher,” or a respectful title for an older woman) Nazeera. Her book, Usul al-Tahyy (Principles of Cooking), was the Arab world’s first encyclopedia of recipes. She studied at the Faculty of Home Economics in Cairo. In 1926, she was selected by the Ministry of Education to continue her education abroad, alongside her school’s other top-performing students. Defying convention—women were expected to remain at home—Abla Nazeera’s family permitted her to go to the Gloucestershire Training College of Domestic Science, in England, where she studied culinary arts and needlework for three years. When she returned to Egypt, she taught at the Saneya School for Girls, and later became an inspector general at the Ministry of Education. Usul al-Tahyy, her celebrated book, coauthored with Baheya Osman, was the outcome of a competition organized by the Ministry of Education to produce an educational cookbook. Originally published in 1953, it would become the quintessential cookbook of the Arab world, with multiple editions, modernizations, and supplemental chapters featuring new recipes and styles.