Depending on how the wind blows, skeletons might be covered within days. Alive or dead, you eat sand and sand eats you. It salts your food, it fills your mouth, it scours and buries your bones.
©David Melody
©David Melody
She went to araby
She asked me was I going to Araby. I forget if I answered yes or no. It would be a splendid bazaar, she said she would love to go. “And why can’t you?” I asked.
-James Joyce
I don’t know how my name stumbled into the pages of Ulysses or she into the pages of Dubliners. But she did, and she did go to Araby and loved it, even visiting me in the hospital there and watching the cats steal from our dinner plate at the restaurant beside the Nile.
Weighing value, valuing weight
No one dared to disagree with Muhammad al-Aziz when he sized a camel with a single glance and said to the buyer, This will dress at two hundred twenty kilos, at two pounds eighty piasters a kilo…so pay the seller that price less my commission, and shake hands and say, Al-Hamdu Lillah.
©David Melody
Shawls and shaa'ils
In Sudan, peacocks prefer turbans, all the better to display their tails. Meantime, those who do the heavy work, those who bear the young and pound the millet into aseeda flour, they prefer to wrap themselves in a shawl, Shaal in Arabic, not to be confused with Shaa’il, a She-Camel Raising her Tail as a Sign to the He-Camel, as per Lane.
©David Melody
Mahdi at the market
That was Mahdi Bashir in the middle. The men to his left and right were also market VIPs, one a seller and the other a buyer. Mahdi was a seller too but also much more than that, he was my friend, my host at his flat on Rushdi Street during his nightly Jalsahs, Seated Gatherings, and most importantly the son of Haj Bashir Abu Jaib, on whose herds and under whose aegis I rode twice from Kordofan to Binban. For that I owe many thanks to all the Abu Jaib family.
©David Melody
A judge on his bench
Attention must be paid when the Hakim al-Suq, the Market Judge, spoke. I first met Sudanese camel men at the Imbaba market when I went there on an assignment for school, to interview a man in the street- any man, anywhere- and then report to fellow American students about the real Cairo, as an exercise in colloquial Arabic and cultural communication. I returned to class with my head swimming about what I had seen, what I did not understand, and how it might be possible one day to ride with the drovers on the Darb al-Arba’een.
©David Melody
The mouth speaks volumes
It was disconcerting to have ridden forty days with Sudanese drovers to the Cairo market and then to find them nowhere about after we had arrived. They stayed mostly out of sight, their work complete, resting in the back rooms until their return journeys home to Kordofan were arranged, the chore of managing camels in the paddocks left to Egyptians such as this one, his galabiyya’s floppy peasant sleeves giving him away as a man unaccustomed even to a camel’s mouth.
©David Melody
Muhammad, market maker
It takes a big man to do a big job, to single-handedly make the market for camels on the hoof. This is the man who did it, setting prices between Sudanese exporters and Egyptian butchers and cracking heads when they disagreed. By the end of the day, the paddocks were emptied, the accountant put down his ledger, and Muhammad al-Aziz walked away from another tally of international trade every bit as important as oil and gas.
©David Melody
©David Melody
qutta, qutn, and ‘aish
So much of Egypt in a single glance. Qutn, Cotton and Qutta, a Cat, watching the Bawaab, Doorkeeper, eat his ‘Aish, Life, as they call their Bread.
©David Melody
Outside the odeon cinema on talat harb
In the state of Maine they closed schools for the week of the potato harvest. In Illinois they hired teenagers in the summer to detassel the corn. In rural Egypt children picked weevils off the cotton and then picked the cotton itself. In Cairo, the young minded sidewalk stalls outside the movie theaters on Talat Harb Street, selling empty change purses and empty plastic shopping bags. That was about it for them, no money to buy nothing.
©David Melody
Baalik
When they are coming your way fast, you only have a split second to ask yourself about each, Is this the look of a Pharaoh, or of the Seated Scribe, or of the Lector Priest Kaaper, or of Queen Nefertiti or Princess Nofret, or of the Lady Tiye or Seneb and his Wife Senetites and their two Children? They say the Arabs brought their language to Egypt but little of their blood. You can see this in their faces, or you think you can when you walk on Mu’izz li-Din Street near Bab Zuweila and they are shouting at you, Baalik!, Baalik!, Your Attention, Pay Attention!
©David Melody
Ozymandias on the wall
They gaze down from high on a wall, higher than the name of God and floating above the junk man and a 25 piaster a plate lunch cart. Sadat, Shah, Carter. It must have been after Camp David and before the Iranian Revolution when Shah was chased out of his own country, dethroned and soon to be dead. Carter too was later chased from office after one term, and Sadat left his parade ground feet first. Look on my works…and despair.
©David Melody
On the banha local
I remember that day well. We had left Bab al-Hadid, Ramsees Station, on a local train into the Delta towards Banha. The plan was to wait until we had passed a few of Cairo’s outer stops and then climb up on the rail carriage’s roof to ride. I don’t know, maybe it was a Wild West kind of thing, maybe it was seeing so many Egyptian kids doing it and having so much fun that I wanted to do it too. Or maybe Daoud thought he could get some great pictures. But this is the only image from that day that has stuck with me, the woman alone and looking inward, letting the man seated behind her to look out at Banha.
©David Melody
Cairo as the mamluks saw it
No cars, no carts, few people. You only saw old Cairo like that early in the morning, perhaps on a feast day or during times of political unrest during the Mamluk era. The buildings themselves are from that period, the 13th Century and following, which you can see by their large limestone blocks and arched windows sealed with iron bars. It was less common to see Cairo like this in the last years of Sadat, when the city was bursting at the seams at all hours. So yes, it must have been early morning, and perhaps Daoud had been out all night.
©David Melody
Waiting for the opening
Many Cairo store counters were like that, empty, in the years before the country’s economic Infitaah, its Opening to global trade and import. You would enter because something curious in the window caught your eye and find inside…nothing. No food, no goods, no money. Sometimes children tending shop, sometimes only their pictures on the back wall. That was all Egypt had for sale in those days, the promise of youth, and even that quickly grew old.
©David Melody
The bawaab dreams of bed
Every respectable apartment building in Cairo had a Bawaab, a doorkeeper who sat on a chair and bided his time. Some doors had wrought iron gates, as did his, even if they shared the sidewalk with machine shops and piles of refuse metal for sale to junk men. Every pile had its price. The mechanic stood watch at his while the Bawaab napped by his, the door unkept, the iron gate unguarded.
©David Melody