If turbans complain about farting, what would your panties say? In love, pregnant, and perched on a camel. Cairo is a prison of men and a paradise of women. The city of Cairo was built by a confectioner. If you can reach a camel’s ear, you can make it couch. If you must love, love a goddess; if you must steal, steal a camel. Even when flogged with a camel whip, a prostitute can’t forget her debaucheries. He said to the camel, play the clarinet; it answered, I have neither tight lips nor thin fingers. It’s not the death of my donkey that saddens me but rather the pleasure of other donkey men. While afflicted by hemorrhoids, someone said to him, give my cat some meat. You have to be a lame donkey to fart so well. Like a goose, tenderness without tits. A donkey unwilling to be mastered takes vengence on its saddle.
-The Spicebox, Egyptian Proverbs, collected by Ahmed Rassim
Rassim was a Cairo-born Francophile, a dandy, and a surrealist, in that order. Over the years of his youth he must have heard a flood of imprecations and immodesties from the family’s cook and wet nurse without understanding a word of them. Only later did he revisit the language and lessons of his childhood. Was it like the idiom list I memorized during my year in Cairo, overlooking a frenetic Midan Tahrir from the Old Campus’ second floor classrooms and wondering, what else is out there?
Probably not, for we only deciphered the Kawkab al-Sharq’s lyrics in her biggest hits Al-Atlal, Inta ‘Umri and Amal Hayati, and I swear their more literary double entendres- “Water me, and drink the ruins”, or “Take me to your sweetness, take me”, or “Let me beside you, allow me your bosom, and leave me there”- compare well to the more Sa’eedi proverbs Rassim recorded....She went to bed thirsty tho’ her husband sells water…A slut, and still she must bring vaseline…He’d want a plucked pussy and a napkin on the side. Looking out the window, I never could have imagined that world.