Leaving Marrakesh in a Big Hurry

“If he were going to run away he must go quickly.”

- The Spider’s House by Paul Bowles

I was going to Marrakesh with David the photographer to write about the Djemaa al-Fna. I didn’t know anybody there so I spoke with musician Richard Horowitz in New York to ask for some contacts. Richard had studied music in Marrakesh and knew a lot of people. He told me to look up [name forgotten, let’s call him Driss Bennani] at the Cafe de France. Richard said I could ask any of the waiters there, they all knew him, and once found to tell him that Richard said hi.

The Cafe de France overlooks the crazy day and night funfair that is the Djemaa al-Fna, its upstairs terrace full of European tourists and Moroccan touts, down-and-out street kids and swell-looking hangers-on. I told a waiter I was looking for Driss Bennani, just as Richard had said, and the waiter gave me a strange look. Marrakesh is full of strange looks so I wasn’t worried. He went over to talk to another waiter, they whispered and looked in my direction, frowned and then smiled, and then the first waiter came back and told me to wait.

A guy came to our table a few minutes later and introduced himself as Driss. I said I was Richard’s friend from New York and maybe he could help me get situated for my interviews. Driss asked about Richard, how well I knew him, and then said that he and Richard were really good friends and he had heard about me coming to town.

I usually don’t use translators or fixers or expediters- whenever I did, I found it best to go to the local university’s English Department and ask the teachers to recommend their best student. That seemed to work

I told Driss that I’d need to interview a cross section of the square’s performers, customers, vendors, and people just crossing through from one side to the other. A random sampling of its craziness- like snake charmers, child boxers, and fortune tellers- and its normality- like snail soup makers, orange juice squeezers, and second hand clothes sellers.

He said he would help, but first he’d like a beer. We hadn’t discussed what I would pay him for his services, we hadn’t even specified what they’d be. I thought I could interview in French and Arabic well enough without him, so I figured I’d pay for food and drink at the cafe whenever we sat together.

I didn’t want to start interviews right away, first I wanted to wander through the square alone, but he insisted on coming along, saying it might be dangerous for David with his camera. The Djemaa al-Fna is as crazy as they say. Crowds and hustles, passers-by and those deeply rooted in the same place year after year, trying to sell or buy, to pick someone’s pocket or to get picked up.

Driss turned out to have a big appetite for both food and drink. That was okay with me, I was on an expense account. He walked us to the hotel and sat in the lobby to talk. We were jet lagged and told him we’d see him at the cafe next day. The following morning he was again in the lobby. Maybe he hadn’t left.

It went on like this for three days. Waiting for us each morning, steering us to meet his “friends” in the square, drinking a lot of beer, then dropping us at the hotel. He became a sticky pest, increasingly meddlesome, intrusive, and overly familiar- somebody I might have said came straight from a Paul Bowles novel if I hadn’t met a few of his type already in my travels.

He never stuck his hand out but I knew that would come eventually. Dave and I did our work without taking his advice on who to interview or where to go in the square. Once when he brought over a street musician to the cafe, the musician said the interview would cost us twenty dollars. I said we’d buy him a coffee instead. He said he was losing twenty dollars in tips by leaving his spot, so he said no deal. I had never seen him playing in the square, and later when I went looking he was nowhere to be found.

I knew we would have it out with Driss sooner or later, definitely when we told him we were leaving town. I said we’d be leaving tomorrow, that he should come by early next morning for one final meeting, which I presume he took me to mean his payday. We waited at the reception for him to leave. We went upstairs to get our bags and check out. Our train to Tangier, to interview Paul Bowles, was leaving that night.

Back in New York I told Richard that his friend Driss was a real pain. Richard said, that doesn’t sound like Driss, what did he look like? I said, tall with glasses and long hair. Richard said, that wasn’t him, Driss is short and bald.

Climbing Khephren at Dawn

“The sides are smooth and equall, the whole fabrick seeming very entire, free from any deformed ruptures or breaches.”

- Pyramidographia (1646) by the Englishman John Greaves, on the Pyramid of Khephren’s (Khafre) fully intact and polished limestone sheath based on his eyewitness account, proving that the sheath was removed between his 1639 visit and 1700, when it was described as being missing

“Back at the tent, skirting the base of the Pyramid of Khephren which seems to me inordinately huge and completely sheer; it’s like a cliff, like a thing of nature, a mountain- as though it had been created just as it is, and with something terrible about it, as if it were going to crush you.”

- Gustave Flaubert, diary entry from Cairo, Sunday 9 Dec 1849

In 1979 anyone could climb the Pyramid of Cheops. Dogs, monkeys, bears- just like climbing the Matterhorn. The Pyramid of Khephren was different- steeper by more than 1⁰, sitting on a higher bedrock base so that by trompe l’oeil it appeared taller, and topped by a forbidding overhang where the squared stones ended and the limestone sheath’s remains as smooth as slick rock began- what alpinists call a “death block” feature. That was the view of Cairo that I wanted, looking down on the Sphinx built by Khephren, son of Cheops, and over to the Nile.

Dave was game, so we set out before dawn by taxi knowing that it was better to avoid encountering the pyramids’ desultory guards altogether than to run into them and have to pay them off. No one deserved baksheesh just for permitting you to risk your neck.

I had already climbed Cheops so I knew the system. Block by block, each between 1.5 and 2 meters square, about two hundred of them in a kind of staircase- hoist oneself up to the next level and then hoist again. The same with Khephren.

I have forgotten its details but I doubt that I looked over my shoulder much on the way up anyway. The sun had risen and getting hot. And I was wondering about that overhang, where the easy steps ended and the slippery part began, only after you’d rounded yourself over the bulge and found toe and finger holds to help scoot up the last bit.

We sat down at that overhang and pondered a next move. We walked around it from underneath, lucky the blocks were mostly intact so we could walk on a level course of stones, and found a place where the overhang was less pronounced. I made a move up and over and found the smooth limestone sheath not to be as smooth as feared. It was an easy low crawl up the remaining few meters, belly flat, at 53⁰ of incline.

I remember the top being flat, the dimension of maybe two or three coffee tables, barely large enough for a group of two. We sat looking outwards, legs dangling, leaning back to the center and looking down at the Sphinx, which was the view I’d always wanted- straight down from Khephren, not at an angle as you see from Cheops. Cairo was already busy, loud, and smoggy. The Western Desert was hazy and just now waking up. We planned to go there next.

My Ustadh in Winter

“Of those he has omitted, a considerable number are so grossly indelicate that he could not venture to lay them before the public, although it must be acknowledged that they excelled in wit.”

-from the preface to Arabic Proverbs, or the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 1830, by John Lewis Burkhardt, explaining the omission of some proverbs from the original collection

“Al-musta’jil wa al-bat’i ‘and al-ma’diya yiltaqaa” “The hasty and the tardy meet at the Nile ferry”

- Proverb 52

My college Arabic teacher in 1974 was Ahmad Tahir Hassanein, a true ibn al-balad, or Son of the Village, as urban Egyptians would call a rural compatriot with rustic manners but honest customs.

I crossed paths with him once outside the library on a very cold morning minutes before opening hour, so we had to wait in the frigid wind. He was wearing only a light weight cotton jacket and a lumberjack type billed cap, the kind with ear muffs that can fold up and snap together on top with the chin strap. That day his muffs were pulled down and strapped under, making him look like an over grown Elmer Fudd.

He had once told our class the story of how, as a poor boy who had distinguished himself in school, he was given a scholarship to study in Cairo, which meant that he had to leave his village in the Nile Delta for the first time in his life and stay away for a year. Upon graduating, he made a telephone call to the village switchboard to say he would be coming home with his diploma on such a day at such a time. The elders where waiting for him in the central square- really more of a dirt-packed open space among the village’s crammed-together houses and market stalls.

My professor told us of how he stepped out of the taxi- he was a tall big man who had to bend over to fit into the seat- wearing a typical Egyptian government bureaucrat’s proud city clothes, a kam qusayr, or short sleeve safari suit, and carrying a Samsonite briefcase.

I had once entered a Cairo cinema for the matinee screening just behind a similarly garbed bureaucrat. We were asked to open bags for security. In his briefcase was a banana, a newspaper, and an alarm clock. I imagined that he was playing hooky that day from his job in Cairo’s massive government building. Reading the newspaper was his morning work, the banana was his afternoon snack, and the alarm clock was set to wake him from a siesta in time to leave the office early for the movies.

Professor Hassanein said that when he stepped out of the taxi, the elders approached not looking at his eyes but rather at his briefcase as if in awe, and then rubbed it like a city fetish, as a good luck charm symbolizing literacy and a government promise of a lifetime job. They all wanted the same for their children, whispering Subhan Allah, God is Perfect, said often when praising a perfect object.

In the wind and cold outside the library that day, the Professor tried to teach me an Egyptian proverb, patiently, with his lips shivering even after the doors had opened and we easily could have walked in and warmed up.

I have forgotten the Arabic but I will never forget the English translation-

A chance meeting is sweeter than meeting by plan.

This is true, he said, even if one is cold and under-dressed and- this he did not say- the other is a thick-headed student.

Qabḍ Jinsi and Cairo's Cinephile Shabaab

qabḍ (n.) contraction, constriction, constipation jinsi (adj.) generic, sexual, racial

- A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic

Qabḍ jinsi- sexual repression, a phrase you learn pretty fast in a first year Arabic class taught in Cairo in 1979. The city of 8 million, reduced by age cohort, let us say adolescents and unmarried adults, half of them shabaab (n.) male youth, and half of them shaababaat (n.) female youth, but seemingly with only the boys on the streets, is still very full of repressed desire. Especially at the movies.

I remember going to the Italian Cultural Center in Zamalek for the afternoon screenings of uncensored new releases. One was Visconti’s last film L’Innocente with Giancarlo Giannini as a married aristocrat, Laura Antonelli as his wife, and Jennifer O’Neill as his demanding mistress.

The IMDB website has the following parental advisory…”Two scenes feature female frontal nudity--both also with a man--though in one the man is naked, the other he is clothed. In the first the couple is obviously making love--it lasts about 1-2 minutes. The second the man pulls a nightgown off the woman and feels her breasts. About the same length as the other scene.”

About midway through at the close of the second nude scene, very tame by my standards, all the young men got up to leave. I asked one of them, Why are you leaving"? He answered, khilis al-jins, the sex is finished. How do you know, I asked? He said, we only stay for the sex. We all saw it yesterday too.

I didn’t know what was more dangerous- a roomful of horny boys, or those same horny boys, still half cocked, out on the streets of Zamalek.

Hyena Men

“The main trade here is in skins; the animals are worked all their lives then flayed afterwards.”

“You shouldn’t go thinking this place is completely savage. Everything’s really much the same as it is in Europe, except that here it’s another pack of dogs and bandits.”

- Letter from Rimbaud dated 15 Feb 1880 mailed from Harar

“We are at Harar, we are always leaving..we must find camels, organize the caravan…Quick, quick, they are waiting for us. We must pack up our bags and go.”

- Letter from Rimbaud’s sister dated 28 Oct 1891, describing his hallucination just before he died

I had always wanted to meet the Hyena Man of Harar. I had read that at night he played with them outside the city walls, that it had become a tourist attraction. And Harar was a city I had always wanted to see, not just because Rimbaud and Burton, Richard twenty five years before Arthur, had visited, and not only because Emperor Haile Selassie had been born outside the walls a year after Rimbaud had left town.

That Harar is called the fourth holiest city of Islam after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem always struck me as just more tourist talk- there is no official ranking, and Harar’s claim- that it had 365 mosques, a different one to pray in for each day of the year- is also not true, unless one counts prayer rooms that might double as coffee warehouses.

I was leading a group of American tourists and one Norwegian convert to Islam who wore a full black robe and hijab. One day when walking through the souk where eagles swoop down to take pieces of meat in their talons, the Norwegian began to feel faint. She was taken to the hospital where the doctors hooked her to a glucose drip whose bag and needle the tour company had to buy at the pharmacy. AIDS country, and sugar water can be expensive in the land of honey wine.

That night we went to the city walls, just beside the city tip, to see the Hyena Man. Other tourist groups had arrived, each vehicle arranged in a semi circle with headlamps on. A man came to center stage with a bag of meat morsels followed by shoulder-hunched and short-haunched hyenas. He fed them the way the Emperor, before being strangled to death in bed, was said to have had his lions fed, gently by hand, and then got down on all fours facing the crowd while the hyenas lined up beside him shoulder to shoulder.

The Hyena Man asked for volunteers to step forward if they would like to help him feed. I said yes, I got on my fours, the Hyena Man asked if I was strong, I said yes, so he prodded the hyena to step up on my shoulders with his front legs and stand tall. The Hyena Man made him reach up to his outstretched arm holding the meat up high over my head and take it gently in his teeth. I served as something of a throne, or maybe just a step stool. Who knew that hyenas were tool users. American tools.

Rimbaud carried weapons and coffee, we carried bras and panties

“…scorched, inhospitable terrain across the very northern tip of Somalia…Actually it is part of Somaliland…In physical reality it is a long way from anywhere…It was dangerous then and it was still dangerous when I visited the area. Literally to ‘lose’ your skin or your testicles was no longer very likely, but…”

- Somebody Else; Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-1891 by Charles Nicholl, describing Rimbaud’s caravan route from the Somali port of Zeila up the Ethiopian highland to Harar

We were heading in the other direction, by land rover not by camel- down from Harar to Hargeisa, capital of Somaliland. An older gent from Texas and I had bought an ice chest of beer before leaving Harar, and we each had a bottle of scotch in there too. We knew we’d have to clear customs and switch vehicles at the Ethiopia-Somaliland border, but didn’t think much about it.

We should have remembered Somaliland’s strict prohibition on alcohol. But it was an easy thing to forget, especially after we had driven past the three story mansion rising up like a painted palace out of its scruffy mud hut and concrete block neighborhood in the town of Jijiga that belonged to Ethiopia’s biggest qat merchant, much of which he sold across the border. If they could chat and chew, I figured we could drink and drive.

A Somali porter carried our group’s gear across the no man’s land gap between the border posts and set it on inspection tables. O brother, this looked pretty official to me. Tafteesh kamil, as they say in Arabic- complete inspection.

Border guards in other parts of Africa love rummaging through tourist luggage, especially if they think it belongs to ladies and they might find, accidentally on purpose- with a “just doing my job, move along, nothing to see here” kind of excuse- a scanty top and bottom or two. But apparently not here.

Just as they were putting hands on the ice chest, I blurted out, Don’t touch that, it’s full of ladies’ underwear. Their grasping hands suddenly recoiled as if they’d heard a viper rattle its tail. The captain who spoke English asked a follow up question…”For how many women?” “A lot,” I answered, “for all the expat ladies in Hargeisa.” Knowing how much his country depended on international NGO income and expat development workers to keep the economy afloat, he waved the chest and all the rest straight through.

Our Dongolawi Greeting

“At this juncture, greeting parties from Dongola came out with gifts for the king and congratulated him on the ghaza [booty raid]. I realized now how stingy this Berberi king was, since he only gave five or ten sheep each from those countless flocks to the ulema notables…And he drank camel’s milk and ate millet bread in his tent. His food and drink were always mean and miserable. He was always drinking boza [millet beer]. I paid no attention however, and continued being sociable, humbly conforming to my surroundings in this place of exile.”

-from Evliya Çelebi’s Matchless Pearl, his map of Sudan and Book of Travels

We arrived at the Nile some 75 km south of town, watered our camels, all 150 of them, and walked over to a school at the invitation of teachers Abd al-Maula and al-Fadil, so we told their first graders that Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer just like all their fathers were.

It was Day 21 on the Way of the Forty and I was ready for some R and R. Dave and I waved over a truck- “Are you going to Dongola? Without stopping?” “If God wills.” Good enough for me- and got aboard, which promptly broke down far short of where we wanted to get. We arrived long after dark when Dongola was deep asleep, so we paid for beds in the hotel’s common room and went out for dinner.

Not millet bread but whole wheat round loaves made over the night shift by flour-faced bakers from the Nuba Mountains who by oven-light looked like friendly ghosts. 15 piasters a loaf. Fresh bread is never mean and miserable, but I could have used some jelly. But no need for boza, they gave us tea in return for us telling them what had brought two Americans to Dongola at midnight. Whatever answer they may have expected, ours was way crazier.

Next day we had to get our exit stamps. Dongola’s military post doesn’t see many land crossers since Egypt is far away and most people leave by ferry through a different border check. The officer was amused, his three soldiers took turns approaching his desk having traded back and forth their sole army cap before saluting the sergeant and delivering the dusty registers, none of which was the right one. So he let us go without signature or stamp.

We had been told to wait for KhairAllah in al-Amiri Yasin’s market stall. Al-Amiri hadn’t been told we’d be coming, so it took a bit of explaining. The name of my friend Hajj Bashir abu Jaib, al-Amiri’s biggest client for his drover resupply business, then and still does open many doors in Sudan.

I remember watching al-Amiri and his fellow merchants weighing dates and rice and sugar by the kilo as they listened closely to KhairAllah and the other trail boss Muhammad al-Himri tell their tales of armed camel thieves and lost desert wells….and thinking, in Dongola they measure out their lives in tea spoons…on the Way of the Forty we drink water by the goatskin.

Macondo is much like Puerto Maldonado

Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.

-first sentence of Cien años de soledad

In 1973 it took me 3 days aboard a cargo truck on a dirt-quickly turning to-mud track to cross over the Andes and drop down the ceja de la selva past Quince Mil all the way to Puerto Maldonado on the banks of the Madre de Dios- called the Ruthless River by an adventuresome gringa who a year before I arrived floated a flimsy raft downstream from there and almost died. Nothing I did or even imagined doing was as dramatic as that.

I had read Peter Matthiessen’s The Cloud Forest about shooting the Pongo de Mainique on the fast-dropping Urubamba River, which runs north from Cuzco, not east. That was what got me to the Peruvian Amazon in the first place, but the Madre de Dios is tame, lazy, wide, and slow compared to the Urubamba- more my style.

Today on the map Puerto Maldonado looks like a city. Back then it was barely a town, more like a village. I remember buying warm bread in the town of Urcos as we started out from Cuzco, and was glad it was warm because I was so cold up at that elevation. Down in the jungle I dripped and panted, shed clothes and dried my face to no avail. It was too damn hot.

I remember sitting alone in the treeless Plaza de Armas on a concrete bench waiting for the next cargo truck to fill up with nuts and hardwood to reverse course up the Andes. I planned to be on it. Meanwhile I had a few days to kill on the plaza. No one else was out. No shade, high noon, too hot. As Ella said, But when the thermometer goes 'way up. And the weather is sizzling hot. It’s too darn hot.

Just me and the popsicle boy, maybe 7 years old, slowly making his square paseo at the plaza’s outer edge. When he got to my bench I waved him over and bought a chupete out of his styrofoam box. I don’t remember what flavor, it would not have mattered even if it had been my least favorite. I don’t have strong opinions about popsicle flavors anyway.

I ate it, he walked his round back to me, and I bought another, he solemnly making correct change. Our transaction was all above board. I ate another, he made another lap, I called him over again, and so on and so forth until I had bought and eaten all his chupetes. There must have been twenty five in the box, and he was as solemn and dignified making correct change for his last as he had been for his first.

I don’t think I could have survived my time in Puerto Maldonado without sucking that ice, sin chupar ese hielo.

But about that gringa. Just a year back I read her book, which tells how her raft got caught in a back water oxbow lake, and she and her husband could not push it out to the current, and they almost died, and finally were rescued by turtle hunters and taken to Riberalta, Bolivia where they were nursed off death’s door by an American Maryknoll nun.

I asked Sister Joan, a Maryknoll nun I knew who had been in Peru at the same time. She knew the nun stationed in Riberalta and remembered hearing the story. Crazy gringos, she said. And unlucky because they had no ice to suck.

Sailing to Dahlak

“As for myself, I boarded a Yemen boat…and reciting the Quranic verse, It will set sail in the name of God, and in the name of God it will cast anchor, and putting our trust in God, we set off for the island of Dahlak…A thousand Fatihas were being recited every step of the way so the boat was brim full of Fatihas. The truth is that without these Fatihas, that boat would not float safely on this sea for a single second…In short, we inched forward on the Red Sea in this fashion, threading our way night and day through coral reefs, full of anxiety as we carefully followed the shore for six days, calling at a number of islands to see the sights and passing by many others, until we came to Dahlak.”

- from Evliya Çelebi’s Matchless Pearl, his map of the Red Sea and his Book of Travels

I was in Massawa looking out to sea. I heard about a man with an 18 meter diesel sambuk and I had met a few foreign tourists ready for adventure. We teamed together to pay for the boat rental from Muhammad Ga'as, an Afar seaman who said he’d sailed these waters since boyhood. But Ga’as in his dotage didn’t trust himself to navigate the reefs, so we set sail under Captain Ahmad Din and a four-man crew, all claiming to know the way "from Suakin to Djibouti on this side, from Jizan to Aden on the other." We would soon see. None of the foreigners seemed to know the Fatiha.

The Dahlak Islands are bare, brutally hot, and pancake flat. The Umayyads established a penal colony there, but found no other use for them. Poet Abu al-Fath Nasr Allah al-Iskandari, quoted by Yaqut al-Rumi in his 13th-century Kitab al-Buldan, wrote, "The worst country is Dahlak, for whoever lands there, dies there." The saying "In dahkhalta jazirat Dahlak satansa ahlak"  may owe its survival more to rhyme than meaning, but it certainly sounds forbidding: "He who sets foot on Dahlak forgets his family."

Only a handful of the archipelago's islands are inhabited today, but the largest—Dahlak al-Kabir, or Big Dahlak—was the seat of an Islamic sultanate from the ninth to the 13th centuries. To visit from Massawa requires a five-hour passage across rough seas.

From Massawa's jetty we set a course first by nearby Dissei Island's rocky summit and the mitten-shaped Buri Peninsula's northern cape, and once in the open sea by compass point alone. Ahmad Din scanned the water for the Dahlaks’ mid-ocean shoals. This time all we saw were flying fish and dolphin—the latter called Abu Salamah, Father of Safe Delivery, who may or may not know the Fatiha .

Crosswinds pushed high swells that the sambuk mounted on the diagonal, waves washing over deck and draining down the center hatch. "Is the sea big today?" we asked Ahmad Din. "Big? No, today is small. Big is in the Bab al-Mandab, the size of a house.”

At last we entered a shallow lagoon on Dahlak al-Kabir's windward side, near the site of the long-vanished sultanate's seat of power. Its traces are gone but for underground cisterns carved from coral stone and a 2000-grave necropolis. A raggedly dressed guardian named Ali Mu'min, proud herdsman of the island's 50 live camels, also watched over the cemetery’s dead. Pointing to headstones of black basalt bearing mixed Kufic and cursive Arabic funerary calligraphy incised on their polished surface, I later found a translation for one of them…

Oh God, verily Abu 'Abd Allah Muhammad, son of 'Abd al-Rahman, son of Muhammad, is Thy servant and son of Thy two servants. Thou has taken him for Thyself and hast chosen for him what is near Thee. He lies prostrate in Thy presence and controls for himself nor harm, nor profit, nor signs rendering manifest his actions, waiting for the day of reckoning, announcing that he has put aside his faults, hoping in Thy mercy, expecting Thy forgiveness, seeking protection from Thy chastisement. Oh God, be compassionate of his prostration and make him forget his loneliness. He died, may God be pleased with him, on Wednesday, 23rd of Sha'ban of the year 327 [June 15, 939].

It was mid month of Ramadan and a Dahlakian named Yunis Hassan recalled the days not long past when pearling supplied the village’s full income. One weighing 10 grams once fetched him 10,000 French "riyals," so he said, but more often he went five days without any find at all. This day he was standing guard at the newlyweds’ door of his son and bride. We knocked and entered, Yunis knowing it to be good that honeymooners receive a group of blue moon foreign visitors. They might bear pearl, or lu’lu in Arabic.

Back on board above deck, the Captain declared the wind too high for a same day return passage. We would sleep and leave before dawn. A coiled bow line was my mattress and brown bilge water, or what would have fooled me if it were said to be not, provided a goodnight last sip. I woke with the sambuk already outside the lagoon. So what they had said was not true, for I had landed in the Dahlak and not died in the Dahlak. Al-hamdu li’llah, the first words of the Fatiha.

Cousin Sissy in Cairo

“Take my camel, dear,” said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

- opening line of The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

My cousin Sissy Schotten, married to a sporting guns dealer and former spy and prisoner of Israel, lived in Maadi, Cairo and spoke not a word of Arabic but looked like an Egyptian grande dame- black haired pulled back tight in a bun, dark eyed both in iris and upper lid, round faced and well powdered, and quite rotund.

She drove a compact car and when pulled over by the traffic police- no doubt fishing for rishwa- would flutter her tongue in a high pitched trill and drive off in a cloud of dust. No point in discussing a bribe without sharing a common language. Sisi means pony in Arabic, not milk cow.

I was in Cairo that year studying Arabic and I went to Sissy’s apartment once or twice as a way to be nice to a family cousin- don’t ask me how we were related- from St.Louis. Sometimes she took me to the Shooting Club overlooking the Nile for lunch, which I liked more than eating at her place.

I never saw her husband Ahmad Osman on those days but once I walked in to his gun shop in Giza to say hello. He knew who I was and greeted me fondly. I always wondered if the shop was a front for something else, and I was right to wonder, because later I read a book about Egypt’s espionage war against Israel, and how he was kidnapped by Mossad from Europe and put in a Tel Aviv prison until released in a spy swap. He was nicknamed “the Professor” because he taught other Arab prisoners how to read.

Sissy later told me the story of how they had met. She was in Seville with her mother and father to study flamenco guitar, her voice certainly deep enough to sing cante jondo. Ahmad was sitting at the next cafe table and asked her father’s permission to speak with her. Sissy had been long unmarried and was very agreeable. They spoke amiably and exchanged addresses. Ahmad then disappeared.

Months later letters started to arrive in St. Louis with European stamps. They were from Ahmad, he said he was not able to be specific about his whereabouts but asked that they become pen pals. They did, at first avidly, then quite loyally, and at last romantically. A year later, Ahmad came to St. Louis to ask for her hand and took her home to Cairo.

Sissy was the centerpiece of a social hub of American expats and visitors. She went to the Maadi Catholic church and knew the Khan al-Khalili tourist souk very well. At Christmas a year later when I was back from Cairo and she was in St.Louis to visit her aged mother, she left a present for me at my house. A brass door plate with my name etched in English, Arabic, and Egyptian Hieratic.

I did not stay in touch with Sissy. I heard later that Ahmad and she had moved to Budapest, so he could be closer to suppliers for his sporting gun business, which surely sounded suspicious to me. Maybe he was still a spy. And this was before the fall of Communism. My mother had her new address, and when another cousin visited Budapest one winter she looked her up and reported that she lived in an unheated Soviet era concrete apartment block far from the city center. I don’t know what happened to her after that, but I still have the brass name plate on my front door, and I think of her most times I see it, which is almost daily.

Bonbibi and the Boy

“Rai jabe bagh hoye ailo khaite dayar ma bonbibi ailo bonete” “When [Dakhin] Rai came as a tiger to eat me, Kind Mother Bonbibi came to the forest [to save me]”

-spoken by Dukhe, honey collecting boy

“I am Mother of all beings in the land of the eighteen tides. Anyone who calls me Mother is relieved of suffering. No injury comes to those in danger who call for me”

-spoken by Bonbibi, Goddess-Protectress of the Sundarbans

“Listen to my vow- I shall never harm he who appeals to You for protection”

- spoken by Dakhin Rai, Evil Tiger Demon, addressing Bonbibi

Verses from the 19th C. Bonbibi Jahuranama, narrative text read aloud by Hindu priests to mixed Hindu and Muslim devotees before altars with painted votive images of Dukhe, Dakhin Rai, Bonbibi, and others during Bonbibi Puja held every January in the Sundarbans

Still fearing the tiger that swims across the narrow tidal creek separating their goat pens from the forest preserve, the men of Kalabagi were not ready to rely on the protection of Bonbibi alone. To prove his point, village elder Abdul Bari showed off his leg scars where it had taken a paw swipe while climbing the tree after him. Abdul Bari’s neighbor and Tiger Response Team leader Farouk Hosein now had a gun.

Twelve year old Hridoy Mullah was not much older than Dukhe the boy honey collector who himself was almost eaten. In the story, Bonbibi heard his call and saved him. Hridoy was too busy banging his pot in fear for his life- a tiger was on the prowl in Kalabagi that night- to invoke Bonbibi’s name.

I was in the Bangladesh Sundarbans to write about the interplay of tide and forest, and man and environment, but tigers were still on my mind even though a recent count by bait station and camera trap had estimated only 100 of these large cats were on this side of the border.

The Bonbibi Jahuranama tells the syncretic Islamic-Hindu story of Bonbibi, daughter of Ibrahim and born in Mecca, who the angel Gabriel (Jibril) takes to the Sundarbans to protect forest workers from the Tiger Demon Dakhin Rai. The poor honey collector boy Dukhe is abandoned in the forest by a greedy merchant as his self-enriching sacrifice to Dakhin Rai. Dukhe’s timely prayer to Bonbibi saves him and all is forgiven at the end. Dukhe, now wealthy from honey and bees wax, marries the merchant’s daughter and Dakhin Rai accepts Bonbibi’s overlordship.

For the men of Kalabagi it is not so simple. Abdul Bari has seen thirteen tigers face to face in his life and never once Bonbibi. Has Hridoy Mullah even heard of Dukhe? No, he says, and he has never collected honey and bees wax in the forest. Both products are in short supply and heavily controlled through harvest permits. Does he know the name Bonbibi? Yes, he says. She lives in the forest and can make us rich if we pray to her.

Note the tiger on the black shirt of the man (standing center)

images of Dakhin Rai (Tiger God), Dukhe (in blue shirt), and Forest Goddess Bonbibi

at a Bonbibi Puja, Bangladesh Sundarbans, January 2016

Orientalists and Oil

orientalisme (1838; de oriental) 1. Science, goût des choses de l’Orient 2. Caractère oriental

-Dictionnaire Petit Robert

“Partly due to the reassessment of the last century- the ridiculous has again become the sublime- as well as to a renewed esteem for technique, Orientalism has again come back into favour.”

- The Orientalists: Painter-Travellers, by Lynne Thornton

The science and taste- as the French would say- for things of the Orient. I’ll test a bite of that. When I was young my grandfather repeatedly screened a 16mm print of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves featuring, as the trailer would have it, the “tantalizing beauty of Maria Montez”- real name, Maria Africa Gracia Vidal, a Dominican actress known as the Queen of Technicolor for her acclaim in heavily colorized action adventure movies.

Maybe that was what hooked me, as the trailer went on to scream in scrolling block print, on “the splendor and spectacle of the Exotic East” and “the fiery adventure of Daring Rogues.” When the end credits bled out to black, I was left in the dark with my imagination. But then I came upon the pictures…of French paintings from the same exotic East, with the same daring rogues and tantalizing beauties.

Ingres, Gérôme, Delacroix, and others perhaps you’ve never heard of- Chassériau, Decamps, Vernet, and Benjamin-Constant (whose painting The Serbian Concubine depicting not one but two nudes in the war-helmeted and armoured sultan’s bed is not on view for obvious reasons, but said to be “emblematic of his production” as reads the accession note)- unless you visit the Orientalist painting gallery (named for Kenneth Jay Lane, a designer of costume- dit fake- jewelry) at the Metropolitan Museum located just outside the Islamic wing so you can easily pivot from the real to the make believe.

Edward Said put Gérôme’s painting The Snake Charmer on the cover of his critique of Orientalism, as if to illustrate the wrong headedness of the entire genre- here in a mosque is a naked boy wearing a snake like a sousaphone before a panel of Islamic calligraphy whose spelling and orthography is as ridiculous as you might imagine a non-Arabic speaking non-Muslim can make it, as far from the sublime as one can take it.

Benjamin-Constant’s The Serbian Concubine, off view at the Metropolitan Museum

Friday at the Cairo Bath house

“I was three days ago at one of the finest in the town and had the opportunity of seeing a Turkish bride received there. All the she-friends, relations, and acquaintances of the two families meet at the bagnio, several others go out of curiosity, and I believe there were that day two hundred women…the virgins very hastily threw off their clothes and appeared without other ornament or covering than their own long hair braided with pearl or ribbon…

She was a beautiful maid of about seventeen very richly dressed and shining with jewels but was presently reduced to the state of nature. Two others filled silver pots with perfumes and began the procession…In this order they marched round the three large rooms of the bagnio. ‘Tis not easy to represent to you the beauty of this sight, most of them being well proportioned and white-skinned; all of them perfectly smooth and polished by the frequent use of bathing.”

-Turkish Letter XLII, 1718, Lady Mary Wortley Montague to the Countess of —

Opposite is the Hamman of Sultan Inal [Bayn al-Qasrayn Quarter], now called the Hammam al-Sultan, all that remains of a large palace built in 1456 and still in use as a public bath. The superstructure is modern but the interior is of interest with a great domed steam room and marble reclining slabs.

-Blue Guide to Egypt, Itinerary 5, Bab al-Futuh to Maydan al-Azhar

Jean-Leon Gérôme and all the other late 19th C. orientalist painters who imagined the inside of the ladies’ bath must have read Lady Mary’s letter from a Constantinople bagnio written some 150 years earlier. Threw off their clothes…hair braided with pearl and ribbon…shining with jewels but reduced to a state of nature…well proportioned…white skinned and perfectly smooth and polished- it absolutely makes the mind race.

My experience was a bit different. It was men’s night, Thursday, and a few fellow students decided to try out an old hammam in the even older Fatimid city. It was Alan’s idea but we all went along. Was it in the quarter of Gamaliyya, Batiniyya, Darb al-Ahmar, or Bayn al-Qasrayn? I can’t remember. It well may have been the 15th C. Hammam of Sultan Inal.

We were about four in number and entered the hammam to find a dingy cold central reception room with a dingy cold floor. We were shown to our changing alcove, open to the main area but for a half-size swinging double door, with a bench, a stack of towels, and wooden shower clogs. We each wrapped one towel around our waist and draped another over our shoulders and headed to the steam room. The temperature was barely tepid in what the Romans would have called the caldarium. I shudder to think what it was like in the tepidarium.

There were a few other men in there, all dimly lit, some I presume cleaning themselves extra well for the next day’s prayer, maybe a few because they had no water at home of any sort. Around the heated pool at center, which no one was in because to me it looked green and dark, were side niches with stools and faucets out of which came cold water. We sat around and waited for it to get warmer.

Then Alan decided to try the pool so he threw off the towels and slid in. It was very hot, he said, in fact almost too hot. And then he froze, went rigid, and started trembling. It was the second time I’d seen him do this, have an epileptic seizure. The first time I was walking beside him along the Nile corniche with traffic speeding by. I caught him then before he fell to the ground and cradled him. He went to sleep in my arms and after some minutes opened his eyes and looked very calm and got up and we walked slowly back.

This time Alan was half submerged in green water. We pulled him out, laid him down on our towels, so we were all fully naked by then. Someone cupped his head in their hands so he would not bang it on the marble floor. The temperature seemed to be heating up, but maybe it was from our insides, not the outside. When he opened his eyes, we asked if he wanted to get out of there, go back to the changing room, and he said yes, so we each grabbed a limb and carried him out of the steam room, laid him on the alcove’s bench, and covered him with towels. Tea is always served after a bath, so we sat around, still mostly naked, sipping our tea and waiting for Alan to feel better. When he did, we got dressed and walked slowly back to our dorm.

I remember the Fatimid city, usually Cairo’s busiest, noisiest part, as being very dark and quiet that night. It was after midnight, but very eerie for more reason than that.

Great Bath at Bursa, Jean-Leon Gérôme 1885

Arabists- A Strange, Odd, etc. Western Peculiarity

mustaghrib (pl. mustaghribeen in Egyptian Arabic) Europeanized, Westernized

mustaghrab (pl. mustaghrabeen) strange, odd, queer, quaint, unusual, extraordinary, curious, peculiar

- A Dictionary of Written Modern Arabic, Hans Wehr

“…an Arabist, one of the most loaded words in America’s political vocabulary. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries an Arabist was merely a student of Arabic, like a Hellenist or a Latinist. But with the birth of Israel…the word ‘became a pejorative for he who intellectually sleeps with Arabs’, someone, that is, assumed to be politically naive, elitist, and too deferential to exotic cultures. The word almost presumes guilt.”

-Arabists;The Romance of an American Elite by Robert Kaplan

“Dhahaba al-arabu bahthan ‘an maa’in” “The Arabs departed, searching for water”

There were two notable student types frequenting the garden at the American University in Cairo in 1979, the year that Egypt made peace with Israel- mustaghribeen Francophone co-eds and mustaghrabeen American students of Arabic. If anyone had called us Arabists in those days, we would have asked in what century they were living or maybe punched them in the nose.

Each sat on opposite sides of the snack bar and barely mixed- the Americans, aptly, around a marble Mamluk-style fountain outside Oriental Hall and the Egyptians, aptly also, beside the campus’ clay courts that could have been at the French Open.

The co-eds wore skin tight jeans and strappy high heels with coifs and maquillage to the max. I remember that we Americans just wore jeans and had no time to comb our hair. Arabic study is not easy and often gets in the way of one’s looks. We were a mixed group of graduate students planning careers that required Arabic fluency, and dhahaba al-arabu bahthan ‘an maa’in- a typical sentence in the first year Arabic primer, correctly declined, conjugated, and inflected- does not translate itself without a lot of hard work.

Kathy become an Arabic bibliographer for top libraries and then entered the foreign service. Sharon became an anthropologist specializing in the Nuer. Paula became a medieval historian, eventually publishing a scholarly article on the Islamic law question, Where in a mosque do hermaphrodites pray?- a topic that she first presented in our colloquial Arabic class that had us all pouring through dictionaries- and Laurie became a political scientist.

Even later once they had greatly improved their Arabic, none would have called themselves Arabists or even Arabistes. And I doubt that the co-eds would have called themselves mustaghribeen ever, because for them to say Merci Awi, a code-switching Egyptian’s way to accept their drink from a sufragi with a “Thank you very much”, is a verbal act of neither east nor west- it just sounds right when sitting in the AUC garden at tea time and you can’t decide where you are or who you want to be

Where budding Arabists would sit, “searching for water”

Letter from Estela

3-XI-95

Querido Luis, Espero que cuando recibas estas lineas te encuentres bien…bueno Luis, yo quisiero que tu como fuera de esta pais me dieras tu punto de vista en cuanto a la situacion que vive en este momento como veras si los ricos se quejan como estan todos los umildes. Pero lo que si te digo Luis que quiero tu opinion de lo que…Feliz navidad y que el cielo te calme de benediciones…

- Estela Lopez Toriz

Estela was one of the four individuals in the ejido Dario Martinez (Valle de Chalco, State of Mexico, on the highway to Puebla just outside the DF boundary past Ciudad Neza) I interviewed over a 2 year period from 1989-1990 for a community oral history I gathered and translated for the Inter-American Foundation (see entries for January 23 for the full report). We stayed in touch by mail for a few years after my last visit during which I gave her a copy of her testimonials that I had edited and transcribed.

It was not easy for her to write to me- her community had no post office, no mail delivery or other government services. I am certain that few of my letters reached her (in fact her letter lamented that she had not gotten any replies to her previous letters sent to me, which either I had not received, or perhaps my returns had not arrived to her).

I recently found this letter from her, written in November 1995, asking my opinion on some updated political news from Dario Martinez- a not unusual tussle between rival community action groups- and wishing me a Merry Christmas, that was folded into a book on my shelf. I don’t remember why I put it there or when.

I had forgotten the letter, but not Estela. She was a single mother, a fighter and a scrapper, a community organizer and an advocate for her neighbors, trying to get the essential services- electricity lines, drainage and sewerage, clean water, a decent primary school- that they deserved for their neighborhood.

Proper mail service was the least of these. The fact that she sent me letters at all, that she thought it a normal thing to write from her squatter settlement to an American in New York, that she expected the mail to arrive despite everything in Mexico that would make such a thing doubtful, proves more importantly that she expected to have the same things that other Mexicans count on without a second thought- a way to speak out, a way to be heard, and a way to be answered.

Feeding Papa Alberto's Pajaritos

Round-Tailed Manakin. Pipra chloromeros. Locally fairly common in Andean foothills and in Amazonia, up to 1500m. While sympathetic with Red-headed Manakin, Round-tailed is more prevalent in seasonally flooded forest; otherwise will occupy terra firme. Short tail in both sexes is slightly graduated. Male often appears crested on nape, but dark eyed individuals safely distinguishable only by tail shape. Voice Song bouts include variable high metallic sounds, mellow whistles, squeaky chatters, and buzzes; a characteristic sound is a buzzy “tsuk’ZRRRT” or ”tsik’DZZRT” and a high rising-falling laugh.

-Birds of Peru, Princeton Field Guide

“Nevertheless this extremely important work is not the end of exploration and investigation on the birds of Peru, because there still exist many unexplored and unknown areas in a country that is complex and full of surprises.”

-from the forward by Dr. Antonio Brack Egg

Papa Alberto was a grandfather who lived next door to Tomas, his married daughter Emma, and their eight year old son Fredy Paul. Alberto lived with his wife Maria and unmarried daughter Elvira. Retired and stooped after a career working in the town brewery, every morning he shuffled up the outside stairs to the second floor roof terrace where he fed his canaries, four cages of them always alive with song. The houses’ two back courtyards were separated by a five and a half foot wall, high enough to maintain privacy between low statured Andeans but permitting a wide open view to taller gringos.

I would greet the bald and dark-eyed Alberto when I saw him on the terrace cleaning cages and adding seed to the feeders. He would greet me back with a happy wave and a mellow whistle, not a “tsuk’ZRRRT” or a “tsik’DZZRT”. He had work to do. Arequipa’s snow-capped volcano El Misti was always in the background, our neighborhood Cerro Colorado was up on its falda. That was a good summer, learning the augmentative and diminutive forms of new words like pedón and pajarito.

Pedón I learned from Fredy and pajarito from Alberto. I thought both were funny words. Later I learned that a pipra was called a saltarín in Spanish, a jumper. Alberto’s canaries did not jump, they did not laugh, and as far as I know they did not pass gas. Alberto would never have said even if they did.

A Round Tailed Manakin, not one of Papa Alberto’s pajaritos