My Cairo Coffeehouse as Home Away from Home

“The multitudinous Arab cafes are small and dirty and hardly worth visiting. Coffee in the Arabian style can easily be obtained elsewhere.”

-Baedeker’s Guide to Egypt, 1914

Today I was trying to find my favorite coffeehouse in Bab al Louk, whose name I’ve forgotten, using Google Earth or Google Maps but had no luck. I know it was beyond the Houriya bar, where back then and still today you can have either a Stella or a qahwa, but the place I’m remembering was closer to Abdin Palace on a little traffic circle. Where I think it was is now shown as a butcher shop. A lot can change in forty years.

Coffeehouses in Cairo were a safe haven for male American students of Arabic but not for women, who knew they would be breaking so many taboos if they sat down that they did not think it worthwhile no matter how tired or caffeine deprived they were. So men in Cairo never get as tired or unjumpy as women, because they can sit down anywhere. Coffee houses are all over town.

You order Turkish coffee with the sugar already boiled in- so you have to specify if you want qahwa saada, qahwa mazbout, or qahwa ziyaada- that is, “unsweetened” [black], “controlled”, or “extra”. The past participle mazbout comes from a verbal root meaning “regulation” that also generates a word meaning “police officer”. I liked to think that the sugar in my regular coffee had been “policed”, by who I didn’t know, maybe the mukhabarat, the secret police. And the verbal root of the word ziyaada, meaning “increase”, also generates the word tazayyud which means “fable” or “yarn”, as if drinking extra sweet coffee will make you into a liar. So Cairo is full of kazzaabs. I thought so.

Lemonade from a Goat

“If they want to ride lemons, let them drink lemonade”

-with apologies to Marie Antoinette

The amount of water a camel needs varies according to the conditions…When thirsty, they can drink 80-100 liters of water at a time.

-A Field Manual of Camel Diseases, Ilse Kohler-Rollefson, Paul Mundy, and Evelyn Mathias

It had been a long first day in the saddle. Glad finally to be on the trail, we all overdid the hooting and the hollering, the kicking and the whipping. We three foreigners were bone tired and parch-mouthed, Steve especially. Our camels were not the fastest mounts in Hajj Bashir’s herd.

KhairAllah said he would make lemonade, since the lemons were fresh now and would not last, and on this first day there was plenty of sugar to waste, a word the drovers had used, on a drink that was not their beloved tea.

The water poured from the skins was black and smelt like goat, but to KhairAllah that was nothing. When boiled, the smell lessened, and when brewed, the black tanning blended to almost normal looking tea color. But we were drinking the water fresh, not boiled, so the smell and the color remained. Lemonade the color of squid ink, with floating goat hair.

KhairAllah handed Steve the bowl first, the same bowl we would use over the next forty days for washing hands, soaking rawhide, and measuring out sorghum to feed the two yearlings. He took just one look and passed it to his left. No, I don’t drink lemonade that looks like that, he must have thought. You have some, he said. So I did.

Kazzaabs and Mentirosos

“I make a living out of the fact that truth is stranger than fiction…Yet I venture to say that I have been called a liar more often than anybody in the world. Ordinarily when one is called a liar- well, to say the least, one feels hurt. But it is different with me. I do not mind it a bit. When I am called a liar by a reader, I feel flattered! That short and ugly word is like music to my ears.”

-from the Preface to Believe it or Not! by Robert L. Ripley

Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited in his expeditions…

-Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

I always liked telling tall tales in foreign languages, partly because, as a leg-pulling American in the pre-Bush, pre-Trump days, I felt I was at an advantage and my interlocutor at a disadvantage even though it was his language and not mine. Now, not so sure this is true.

In 1984 in Sudanese Nubia I was sitting by lamp light in a mud dwelling and talking to farmers about New York skyscrapers. I said something that I knew to be true but I presumed they would hear, at best, as a truth stranger than fiction and at worst as a lie. I told them we had two 100 story buildings there, and waited for them to express disbelief. Kazzaab, I expected them to think.

Later I saw the film 11’09”01 September 11, 11 short films made by international directors responding to 9/11 in 11 minute segments. The short by Samira Makhmalbaf was about a teacher telling her young children in an Afghan refugee school in Iran about what had happened. She told them that a tower had fallen and asked if they knew what a tower was, pointing out the window to the brick kiln chimney. She asked for a minute of silence but, looking up at the tower, they didn’t know how long a minute lasted.

In Nubia, one old man told me he had heard about those buildings. And then he asked me if it was also true that they each had a grocery store on the 50th floor. He asked that with a smile, which I could not read either way. I hadn’t heard about that I replied, and I still could not say if he asked in all seriousness. The others did not seem surprised, as if to them it made perfect sense- where else would you buy gargeer and mulukhiyah, they must have thought, but in your own neighborhood.

On the 4th of July, 1973 in Peru I was asked how I’d like to celebrate my independence day. I said, in the traditional way, by boiling hot dogs in beer, then cooling the beer and drinking it. This is what we all did, I said. Tomas said, OK, let’s do it, that sounds good, so I then had to come clean with him. Just joking. And he said, I knew all along that couldn’t be true, because boiled beer is spoiled beer, and Americans are too practical to waste anything.

St. Simeon Hoist on His Own Pillar

…Mebis, yesterday (it happened by chance)
I found myself under Simeon's pillar.
I slipped in among the Christians
praying and worshipping in silence there, 
revering him. Not being a Christian myself
I couldn't share their spiritual peace-
I trembled all over and suffered;
I shuddered, disturbed, completely caught up.
Please don't smile; for thirty-five years -think of it-
winter and summer, night and day, for thirty-five years
he's been living, suffering, on top of a pillar.
Before either of us was born (I'm twenty-nine,
you must be younger than me),
before we were born, just imagine it,
Simeon climbed up his pillar
and has stayed there ever since facing God.
I'm in no mood for work today- …

-Simeon by Constantine Cavafy

In October 2003 I was in Damascus on a Monday and I’d heard about Lukman Derky’s open mic poetry night, Bayt al-Qasid, at the Fardoos Hotel. I thought I’d go to read Constantine Cavafy’s poem about Simeon the Stylite. I had just been to see his wrecked basilica outside Aleppo in the so-called Dead Cities, ruined Byzantine era settlements large and small.

As often, Cavafy creates a fictional character of historical plausibility as the poem’s speaker, in this case a neo-platonic Hellene aesthete living in the 5th Century who interrupts an arid debate about who is the better poet, Libanius or Meleager, that he is having with his friend Mebis in order to recount a visit he had just made to Simeon’s pillar and his near-conversion experience there.

I thought, maybe there would be something in this poem for the young Syrian poets in the hotel’s basement bar. Any one of them could have been Mebis’ friend, the poem’s anonymous speaker, and they too may at one time or another have had a religious experience somewhere along the line.

I found Lukman in the corner smoking and talking to friends, I asked him if I could read Cavafy’s poem, and he said yes, but only if I could quickly find someone to translate simultaneously into Arabic. I would have to stop every few lines for the translator. That’s how I met Hala Feisal, a painter who said she would try. In a quiet corner I read her the poem, I explained its first person voice and how it should flow conversationally as if being spoken to a friend.

When my turn came I explained to the audience the situation of early Christianity in Syria, the poem’s moment in time, the gradual fall of Hellenism and the less gradual rise of Christianity, a slow motion paradigm shift of politics and belief. Hala did her best, the room was quiet, I think it followed and made sense.

This all happened barely six months after Bush invaded Iraq. There were many Iraqi refugees already in Damascus. I remember talking to some in a restaurant. They were glad to be out of there. I don’t know if any Iraqis were at the Fardoos that night. In any case, for them the paradigm shift in politics and belief was not gradual, but fast. But as did Mebis and his friend in Cavafy’s poem, they did not go back to discussing poetry after an improbable diversion to the foot of Simeon’s pillar. Then, there would have been nothing left, a bit like that rough stone that now sits on the pillar’s pedestal.

Kevin Bubriski’s superb b/w photographs of the Basilica of Saint Simeon are in Legacy in Stone: Syria before War, Powerhouse Books, 2018

open mic poetry night in Damascus, before the war

a stone marks the site of Simeon’s pillar

A Cure for Serpents- Being Robuste

…“Or vedi com' io mi dilacco!/vedi come storpiato è Mäometto!/Dinanzi a me sen va piangendo Alì,/fesso nel volto dal mento al ciuffetto./ E tutti li altri che tu vedi qui,/seminator di scandalo e di scisma/fuor vivi, e però son fessi così”.

-Canto XXVIII

“Buaron, Rebecca, proprietress of Misurata brothel, 78-87; Ghazala, prostitute, 159-60; Gmera, prostitute, 88; Khadija, prostitute, 83,86; Mabrouka, prostitute, 87; Mahadia, prostitute, 83,85; Massauda, prostitute, 153-57; Mne, prostitute, 82,84,87; Prostitution, Moslem attitude to, 19; Salma, prostitute, 83; Yasmina, prostitute, 87…”

-Index to A Cure for Serpents, Alberto Denti Di Pirajno, memoir of an Italian colonial doctor in Libya and Eritrea, and later the Governor of Tripoli

If Dante placed a disemboweled Muhammad and a cloven Ali in the 8th Circle of Hell for fomenting schism among monotheists, the Duke of Pirajno would rather have lain there next to Gmera, Ghazala, or Mabrouka “The Lucky”.

Once in Libya I was being driven from Tripoli to Fezzan by two randy young men assigned to show me the country. We drove past a desert hospital in Mizda (according to the Duke, called by the Arabs the blad el asrar, the land of mysteries) and they wanted to pull over to see the “Ukraniyaat”, the “famously beautiful” (according to Libyan male folklore) Ukrainian nurses whose medical team was headed by the “voluptuous blonde” (in the words of a diplomatic cable from the US ambassador to Libya, released by Wikileaks) Galyna Kolotnytska, said to be Qaddafi’s mistress-cum-bodyguard.

I was told that I must read Pirajno’s memoir by a lady I’d met in Andes, New York, and was glad to have been given the tip, for after reading it I learned we had covered much the same territory- Mizda, Nalut, Ghadames, Massawa, Harar, etc. I remember once being told in Asmara at the breakfast table by a skinny Frenchman that because I was ”robuste” I had not gotten sick the night before, as had he and our other companions, from drinking bad alcohol at the hotel bar.

I did not need Dottore Denti’s well practiced medical knowledge of a body’s ills, chills, and other North African indispositions, which he cured most happily in Libyan brothels and Eritrean boudoirs and wrote about in the most exquisite detail, to know that being robuste is not enough for one to avoid a fever in Asmara or Tripoli. It also takes a bit of luck. Mabrouk!

A Night Out with Prince Muammar in Tawfiqiyya

For years, downtown's Al-Tewfikiya street was synonymous with the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, until a government clampdown on the illegal group shut that head office down in 1995. Nine years down the road, some may find it somewhat ironic that the very same street would become associated with the launch of the largest-ever campaign against homosexuals in Egypt.

-Al Ahram Weekly, 4-10 March 2004

I forget the name of the seedy nightclub in Tawfiqiyya, just west of Ezbekiyeh Garden and north across Twenty Six of July Street. It was downstairs and its street door was unguarded. At the foot of the stairs we were asked where we’d like to sit, in which of the three concentric rings surrounding the stage- the innermost whiskey-by-the-bottle ring, the middle whiskey-by-the-glass ring, or the outer beer ring. Each ring had only one row of tables, so the sight lines were just fine for beer drinkers, so that’s where we sat and drank.

The MC was trying to warm up a sparse crowd, but only one table in the by-the-bottle ring was occupied, by an older gent in western clothes and a young man in dishdasha and flat fold turban, maybe Saudi, maybe Emirati-definitely “Arab”, as the Egyptians call them derisively. The gent kept the bottle closer to him than to the younger guy, but his glass was full too.

A belly dancer came on looking kinda lame. She only had that one table to dance for so she spent most of her time looking in their direction, showing us her rear end. No belly rolls for us. A dombek player and electric organist were already trailing off their trills and beats. The MC had to do something or he’d lose the crowd completely.

He grabbed the cordless mic and stepped forward. “Hayy al Amir Muammar. Hayy al Amir”. Long live Prince Muammar. Long live the prince. The gent followed his prompt and threw a bill onto the stage floor at the dancer’s feet. Another prompt, another thrown bill. Were they 1 guinea bills, or 5s? Either a buck and a half or seven? I couldn’t tell.

The MC kept at it, “Hayy al Amir, Hayy al Amir”, revving us up until we chimed in too. Finally Prince Muammar threw down a few of his own, enough for the MC to start his speech- evidently he had been waiting for this moment, and had it practiced- about how the Prince’s tutor was taking him on a world tour to learn about foreign lands and their customs, so he could go home as a wise man to one day run his father’s country- not quite the story of Candide and Pangloss, more like the Prodigal’s Return

We all applauded the story. The dancer came back, this time facing us so we could see her belly fat roll up and down. Not bad. Kind of mesmerizing. We left before Prince Muammar and his tutor. Maybe back in the hotel he got lucky with the belly dancer. More likely his tutor did, but on the Prince’s guinea, or was it a fiver?.

Drinking near Sugar Street

“He left the coffeehouse at nine thirty and proceeded slowly across al-Ataba to Muhammad Ali Street. Then, entering the Star Tavern, he greeted Khalo, who stood behind the bar in his traditional stance….The excessive reliance of these men on alcohol was apparent in their bleary gaze and in their complexions, which were either flushed or exceedingly pale… after imbibing the nastiest, cheapest, and most intoxicating drinks available….Khalo brought Yasin a drink and some lupine seeds. Accepting the drink, Yasin said, “See what January’s like this year!”

-Sugar Street by Naguib Mahfouz

“Cafes in the European style, at which beer and other beverages are obtained, abound in and around the Ezbekiyeh, none of them are suitable for ladies.”

-Baedeker’s Guide to Egypt, 1914

There were a few seedy bars left near Tawfiqiyya Square in 1979, not many but easy enough to find. I entered one after dark and took my seat against the wall. There were no chairs and tables in the center of the room, only pushed back against the wall, so you had to turn 90 degrees left or right to have a conversation, which is hard. Maybe they came here just to drink, not to talk.

Most were drinking zabeeb, (a clear alcohol made from raisins, which the word also means, and which by ironic coincidence is also the word for the forehead callus observant muslims develop from prayerful head prostrations), aka arak, raki, ouzo, fire water. And eating soaked lupine seeds- tarmus- from a saucer, and when the lettuce vendor made the rounds, nibbling on fresh green leaves like a rabbit might. Hydration. Good idea if you planned to drink all night.

I remember ordering one too many and stumbling home much later by way of the right bank of the Nile. It was not the most direct route but it is hard to get lost from there if you keep the Nile on your right hand and head upstream, turn sharp left at the British Embassy’s old walls, wind your way through Garden City, cross Qasr al-Aini, and take a few last steps up Tomb of Sa’d Street to my front door, unguarded so late by Ahmad the Bawaab, who I would not want to see in my present condition anyway. He might talk.

A Film Screening in Umm Badr

“No leaders anywhere, in Brewster’s opinion, could have more physical presence than the nazirs and sheiks of the Sudan. Nearest to the High Table sat the king of the Meidob, and directly across from him was the nazir of the Kababish. Each was surrounded by several sheiks of his tribe. Across the aisle, they acknowledged one another with predaceous stares.”

-“Fifty-two People on a Continent”, an essay that begins with a portrait of an American working in Sudan, by John McPhee

McPhee describes a meeting between the heads of the Meidob and Kababish tribes near Umm Badr, where I went in 2010 to screen “Voice of the Whip”, a documentary film shot in places not far away. The film’s Arabic dialect is unique to the Kababish and nearly impossible for Arabs of other locales to understand- thus the fact that when screened before other Arabic speaking audiences, the film’s jokes and stories always fall flat and many can follow only with subtitles.

Thus Umm Badr provided “the perfect audience”, needing no extra-filmic explanations or translations, the kind of audience that documentary filmmakers are keen to have. In my case, it meant waiting twenty two years and travelling a hundred miles off the blacktop in North Kordofan province to reach them.

The village has no central electrical supply, only solar panels, batteries, and a community generator with long extension cords. We opted to run the DVD player and projector with solar, competing for power with a TV set up outside for an Africa Cup soccer match. We were indoors as night fell and started the film. Five minutes from the end we were shut down by an AK-47 toting soldier who insisted his commanding officer wanted to see me immediately.

We walked a few hundred yards in the dark to his post where the officer was also watching the match. I waited impatiently. The soldier offered me a broken plastic chair. I petulantly kicked it over and said, And you call this hospitality? You might have said that I gave him a predaceous stare.

The officer finally emerged from his TV room wearing a soccer jersey and flip flops. No, he said he had not sent for me, and he already knew that I was in Umm Badr with permission to show a movie. And no, he didn’t have time to come to the next screening.

I gave three more screenings that night, all powered by an extension cord from the generator because the solar panels had drained. It was a big success I thought, especially the last outdoor screening projected against a mud wall, on a hot night with no ambient light except for stars.

Many in the audience recognized the drovers and trail bosses on camera even though their faces were all twenty two years younger. They laughed at the lyrics of the camel driving songs- “O Rocket of the Sudan, your eye like a Seiko watch”- and one drover’s amorous address to a sand-roasted goat head- “You love me and my belly loves you”. No subtitles needed in Umm Badr. It was all in their language, spoken by familiar voices.

At the Movies with Ahmad

May Allah bless you. Praise Allah for your safe arrival. How is your condition? And yours? May Allah bless you. Praise Allah for your safe arrival. How is your condition? And yours? May Allah bless you….

-Straw boss Ahmad Hassan Abd al-Majid greeting Sudanese camel drovers upon their arrival at his Upper Egyptian stable, in a late scene in the documentary film “Voice of the Whip”, March 1988

I have known Ahmad since 1984 when I arrived for the first time in the company of Sudanese camel herders at his home in Binban Bahri village across the river from Daraw, 40 km north of Aswan. He was not expecting to find two Americans, me and David, in the company of the drovers after their completion of the camel trail up from Kordofan, but he threw down the welcome mat and received us like kings.

In following years I wrote him postcards from my foreign travels- India, France, Peru, Cuba- always addressing him with the honorific Al-Aakh al-Aziz, The Distinguished Brother, and adding formulaic words of greeting, knowing full well that it would be read by every Egyptian postman in its chain of delivery, from Cairo’s central PO all the way down to Binban’s humble mail desk. In those days the Egyptian postal service functioned well, and most of the cards arrived. He later showed me a stack of them.

In 1988 I needed another favor. Our film crew had decided to leave the herders on the Sudanese side of the border, fearing trouble with Egyptian police, and instead took the ferry to enter the country by the book. In Aswan the customs inspector bought our story that our 40 rolls of 16mm film, Aaton camera, and boom mic were just personal video equipment- the usual tourist stuff, we said.

We arrived at Binban a few days before the herd and told Ahmad that we would film the herd’s arrival as they approached. But we had problems. We did not know exactly when the herd would arrive, and our film camera’s 12 volt lithium battery had malfunctioned. We would need to improvise with 8 fresh D cell batteries strung together. Finding fresh batteries in rural Egypt is not easy.

Ahmad solved our battery problem, positioned us in the correct spot to intercept the herd outside the village, and had a vehicle stand by for us to film on the move when the time came. It all worked out perfectly, and we filmed Ahmad greeting the drovers and spreading straw bales for the hungry camels.

The film was completed in 1989 and I had returned to see Ahmad twice in the meantime but not with the film to show. The 16mm had not yet been transferred to DVD. In 2010 I had my chance to screen the film at the Nubia Museum and in Binban. I had my own DVD player and digital projector with external speakers.

We had three screenings- in Ahmad’s compound, one for the women and one for the men, and in the village diwan for the elders who had not come to Ahmad’s house. There was much murmuring of recognition and understanding from the audiences, because most knew the Binban merchants on camera, and they knew enough about the Way of the Forty to pay close attention to its daily details- making the millet paste dinner called aseeda, patching sore camel pads with cowhide, etc.

And naturally Ahmad was the village favorite- batal al-shaasha, I called him with a wink, hero of the screen. Greeting the drovers, giving them double cheek kisses and embraces, and acting like the camels were all his and his alone. It made him into a village big shot. A much bigger shot, no doubt, than someone who knew people in Peru, India, and Cuba who called him Distinguished Brother.

Recalling a Beirut Beach from the Banks of the Sudanese Nile

Beirut Welcomes Marines; Second Contingent Ashore; Beirut Receives US Marines from 6th Fleet Ships Quietly

Beirut Lebanon July 15 1958. Special to the New York Times. United States Marines landed in Beirut today at 3pm to back up the Lebanese government of Camille Chamoun against rebels or outsiders. The Beirut public received them like a circus coming to town..During the afternoon, formations of US jets shrieked over Beirut to the delight of small boys who shrieked back in excitement… Within five minutes the Marines were pouring across the beach flanked by crowds of admiring Lebanese…Difficulties arose because many Lebanese could not understand what the Marines said…

In February 1984 I was along the Nubian Reach of the Nile having dinner in the home of Hajj Hassan Sayyid in Farka Dal, near the Batan al Hagar, the Belly of Stone, where the Nile breaks through its granite shield to make one hell of a long cataract. It was just the local men folk and me and David, and one was the Hajj’s son Ahmad Hassan, who showed me his wooden leg and said it was a gift from America.

What did he mean, I asked. He told me that when the Marines came ashore in Beirut in 1958, he was a student sitting in a corniche cafe watching all the action. A gunfight broke out between rival Christian militias, in a sideshow to the international crisis involving Moscow and Washington, Communists and Capitalists. But the NY Times got it right, from the Lebanese perspective it was just a circus.

But Ahmad took a bullet that day and the doctors said they had to amputate. So he had to come home to Nubia where the electrical generators cut off at 9pm, hobbling from house to house, drinking tea and remembering the day the US Marines landed, and wishing he had not been there.

BEIRUT — For more than 150 news correspondents covering the Lebanese landings here, this has become the "taxicab war."

Newsmen use taxicabs to race from one sudden and unexpected development to another. Military officials, on non-tactical errands, take taxis to surmount the shortage of official vehicles, and diplomats, rushing from conference to crisis, hail a cab to keep their appointments.

The taxicab drivers are having a picnic and are among the very few in this "Paris of the Middle East" who do not miss the foreign money lost by the sudden decline in paying tourists.

The Spring of Ever Giving Life, in My Living Room

“You go west from St. Daniel, out of Constantinople, into the country where the monastery named Pege is. In this monastery there is holy water and holy fishes. The sick wash themselves with this water and drink it, and healing comes.”

- Russian Anonymous, a 14th C. Russian pilgrim to Constantinople

According to a late legend, the day of the conquest of Constantinople,  a monk was frying fishes in a pan near the spring. When a colleague announced to him the fall of the city, he replied that he would believe him only if the fishes in the pan came back to life. After his words they all jumped into the spring and began swimming.

-story recounted by Ernest Mamboury, Swiss scholar of Istanbul’s History

There was a Greek icon in my mother’s living room I knew nothing about until I saw the same image, the Virgin in the topmost basin of a multi-tiered fountain, in a book which identified it as the Spring of Ever Giving Life, the Zoodochos Pege, in Constantinople. The legend of the spring is associated, they say, with Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt, childbirth, and wild animals.

When I was in Istanbul I visited the spring, now with gold fish swimming, in the basement of a 19th C. Greek church, built on the site of an earlier church destroyed by the Ottomans. Its cemetery has headstones inscribed in Karamanli Turkish, Ottoman Turkish written in Greek letters, with objects depicting the trade of the deceased- wine barrels for tavern keepers, scissors for tailors, pens for scribes. You can buy vials of holy water from the spring but not fish.

Rid of the Person, Escape to the Poetry

And so it was Shahid entered the broken world/when everyone had bypassed the heart’s expectant bones

-Bones (After Hart Crane), Ghazal by Agha Shahid Ali

Don’t ask what happened to the defeated heart/Oh Faiz how it broke once again/into hopeless longing.

-Ghazal by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Translated by Agha Shahid Ali

These problems of mysticism! This discourse of yours, Ghalib!/ We would consider you a saint-- if you weren't a wine-drinker.

- Ghazal by Ghalib, translated by Frances Pritchett

Tell your friends, Dagh, it’s not child’s play. The task of learning Urdu is uphill all the way.

- Ghazal by Dagh Dehlvi

I was at a mushaira, a gathering of Urdu poets in recital, one night in Karachi and I wandered backstage where I found 12 year old Anum Masood and her pink autograph book filled with bits and pieces of ghazal couplets she was jotting down from her favorite poets. She also wanted them to write their pen names, their takhallus, which all poets use in their ghazals’ last verse, as both a reflexive tribute to their implied genius and as a cry from the heart. Most ghazals can make the audience cry, or cry out Vah! Vah! and wave their hands in the poet’s direction, as if to tell them, I hear you, superb.

Takhallus is a word of Arabic origin meaning escape, liberation, or flight from- or riddance- as if the poet must establish a second persona, one not of himself, in order to compose and recite in public. Even when the takhallus is simply the poet’s first name, it is still an escape of sorts from whom they were born as. So I wondered whose names Anum was collecting in her pink book, and if she would remember them when she grew up.

Smite the rock, pour the water, toss the filter

And remember when Moses prayed for water for his people and We replied, “Strike the rock with thy staff” whereupon twelve springs gushed forth from it, so that all the people knew whence to drink. And Moses said, “Eat and drink the sustenance provided by God, and do not act wickedly on earth by spreading corruption.”

-Sura 2, Verse 60, Quran

Behold, I will stand before thee there upon the rock in Horeb; and thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink. And Moses did so in the sight of the elders of Israel.

-Chapter 17, Verse 6, Book of Exodus

We were worried about having to drink dirty water from open wells so David brought a carbon filter water pump from an outdoor gear store in the USA. We gave it a try on the first day on the trail when we poured water from freshly tanned goatskins into a bowl and it came out colored brown looking like strong tea, with wafting goat odor and floating hair. Dave pumped it into another bowl and it came out crystal clear and smelling sweet. Wallahi al Azeem, By Allah the Great, they said.

The pumping got harder gradually and then the pump froze up in its casing. We changed the filter, we had one extra, which was almost black from all the skin tanning it had cleared but the pump was still froze. Ma yinfaash, they said, It’s worthless.

So we threw it away on that first day and drank goat tasting and smelling water from the skins until they finally cleared up on their own. And we shared everyone else’s germs, their coughs and sniffles, until we’d passed them all around. I doubt the filter would have helped us avoid the common Sudanese cold in any case.

Easy, Easier, Easiest

①sahl easy②ashal easier③al-ashal easiest④ishaal diarrhea

-Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic

We were approaching Wadi al-Kalabsha at night, not far from Aswan whose glowing lights we could see. We were low on water, dead out in fact, and tired, angry, and thirsty. Too far a ride for lake water, we’d have to draw from these putrid wells if we wanted to drink tea and boil millet. How putrid was it? We gagged on sulfur from a distance.

Government schemes had over fertilized the ground. Land reclamation in Egypt is a science of “more is more”- more irrigation, more nitrates, more urea. So the ground and its water smells as you might guess.

Before the lake rose and it was moved, Kalabsha’s wadi had been the site of ancient Nubia’s largest temple, a Roman era grand construction begun by Augustus and completed under Vespasian. One archaeologist called it “a common holy place for the Roman military and the nomads they were stationed there to control.”

Fast forward 2,000 years and, mutatis mutandis, I know for a fact that KhairAllah and Masood had nothing in common with Egyptian border guards stationed there to control them. Control? More like shake down. Not even worth going over to their post and asking for fresh water. So we drew from the well holding our noses and with it brewed rancid tea and boiled gaseous aseeda.

At midnight it all blew up, inside each of us one by one, getting up from our bedrolls, threading carefully but quickly through the maze of couched camels to the outer ring of light thrown off by our dying fire, and there in the sand dropping our drawers. Ishaal.

We thought it would be so easy, for sure easier than what we’d already been through, in fact the easiest part of the whole Way of the Forty, to finish this last bit of trail to Binban. But it was hard. And soft at the same time.

Passementerie Fit for a Bride

••••Marriage without the dowry is like an animal without a pack saddle••••He who says that a wedding is easy [to pay for] should only serve water••••Marry a short one, when you cut clothes for her it won’t be a problem••••She is like a needle that sews clothes for others but is herself naked••••

-Wit and Wisdom in Morocco (1930), proverbs collected by Edward Westermarck

We were told to get in touch with Amal when we arrived in Fez. She would take David to the shops and artisans in the medina where he would take photographs for the magazine, to illustrate an article on the marriage regalia- wedding kaftans, head-coverings, pillow cases, bed throws- custom-ordered for a Fassi bride’s trousseau.

Amal was a teacher at the American Center and a very striking person- tall, clad in tight jeans, her hair honey-colored and uncovered, and in a hurry. She rushed us through the medina’s low-stepped and cobble-stoned streets swarming with shoppers, deliverymen, and pack mules.

••••Don’t marry a rich woman, she will treat you arrogantly and say, Fetch water••••The wife of a poor man is despised even though she dresses in silver and gold.••••Don’t marry an old woman even if you will eat with her pigeon and lamb••••Marry a woman of noble birth [even if poor] and sleep on a mat••••

Passementerie is a French word, for the passements sewn by 16th C. Parisian artists trained in a seven year apprenticeship to make the wardrobe for king and court, but today the word springs to life in the hands of Moroccan needle artisans, especially those in Fez. Threaded round buttons, tassels, fringes, borders, trimmings and edgings, galloons, rosettes, gimps, and pompons- these are the passements that beautify a Fassi bride.

Walking through the medina heading for the needle workers souk, Amal did not slow down. There were silk thread bobbins and folded satin base fabrics in all colors. Custom dyers unwound the bobbins and stretched out the hundred meters of thread to hang from overhead hooks along the souk’s winding passageways- as if guiding the rescue and return of a bride like Ariadne from her dark dungeon.

••••Don’t marry a tall woman, her clothes and underwear will embarrass you••••Not even a dog runs away from a house where there is a wedding••••The native of Fez when he swears is like a donkey when it feeds••••

Amal got us to where she had to go, not once losing herself in all the twists and culs-de-sac. But she must have heard an imprecation from the shadow- why was an uncovered woman running through the souk trailed by two Americans? From her mouth poured a volcanic retort of the foulest proverbs and most guttural curses to ever shame Westermarck in all his field research. She was hurried in both word and deed, and now all the world knew it. Fassi brides bow to no man.

Tangier, for the Interview

Dear Mr. Werner, I have not yet received your missive sent directly to Rue Campo de Amor, possibly because the authorities here have changed the names of all streets. None here including taxi drivers know the present names although they have been posted for three years. Whether I can be of any help to you I don’t know, but I shall be here all through January and should be pleased to see you. I have no telephone. Sincerely, Paul Bowles

-letter dated 28 Dec 1991

I had read his travel essays “The Rif, to Music” and “The Route to Tassemist” and did not believe him when he wrote that he had driven 25,000 miles during the last six months of 1959 while recording Moroccan music in all parts of the country. That is the circumference of the Earth, and the country is only 1,125 miles long and 325 miles wide. That would be like driving from Tangier to the oasis of Tah, on what was then the border with Spanish Sahara, back and forth twenty two times.

So I figured that the music must have been pretty good. I wanted to interview him about the music.

We stayed at the Grand Hotel Villa de France even though it was officially closed for a remodel, but the bell boy let us look through Room 35’s window, where Matisse had painted the view in blue over the winter 1911-1912. I had read Bowles’ essays in his collection “Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue.”

I had been instructed to contact Bowles’ American secretary and Tangier neighbor Cherie in order to make the appointment to see him. I was told that no one could see him without going through her, that there had been too many hippie pilgrims just stopping by to say hello after the release of Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky. Cherie also had no phone, so David the photographer and I went to her apartment. She asked if we wanted to go upstairs one flight to see Bowles right that minute. We said sure.

Bowles’s door was open so we walked straight in. The front room had a fire lit in the fireplace tended by a Moroccan man with a hot poker busy turning over the burning logs. He was speaking loudly to no one in particular. Bowles was wearing a sweater and sitting on the sofa recovering from a flu and looking frail. Cherie introduced and left us.

I started by asking about his early field recordings, especially of the Berber ahidous and ahouache dances- what he described as “nights with fires and drums”- for the Library of Congress, the subject of my article. I told him I had read his lengthy correspondence with Harold Spivacke, head of the LOC’s music division who had made Bowles’ recordings possible. That warmed him up to me I felt. Most recent interviews had been only about the film. Too much hype he felt.

We talked about his multiple trips with the old reel to reel tape recorder, of how he had talked his way into many private ceremonies in rural and urban Morocco that included music- some religious, some social- in the years just after independence from France, when suspicions of Westerners were still rampant. Especially when they carried recording equipment never seen before.

We talked also about how Western music was infecting the non-West, and how non-Western music was infecting the West. He didn’t like it either way. He had first come to Tangier to study classical music composition with Aaron Copland, having his piano delivered to the house by donkey to work on his Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet. About his first days there, he wrote, “We landed and Morocco took over.”

Did he know then that the oboe is just like a Moroccan ghaita, with the same double reed sound, if played quite a bit wilder? He knew this very well in later years when he championed the Master Musicians of Jajouka. He must have smoked a lot of kif with them too.

There were several knocks on the door while I was there, all from hippie pilgrims hoping to shake his hand or get high. He no longer smoked, he said. Cherie steered the hippies out. David took him into the back room where the sunlight was streaming through the window for a photograph. We left, later wondering if he had recovered from the flu.