Cairo to gharghur by train, bus, and donkey

Going to the oasis was like a birth process, the desert road seemed like a long fallopian tube, and the intense green of cultivation hemmed in by dunes the size of huge slices of an orange tossed from above dazzled my eyes. In Dakhlah I went from the towns of Mut, Death, to Al-Jadida, The New One, then to the hamlet of Gharghur, from the verb, To Gargle. Ate greasy pigeon, bread pudding, fresh olives, dates. The father of my Cairo friend is a Haj, meaning he’s been to Mecca, kept pointing at me then looking to the sky and saying, You Illuminate the House. Evenings we sat in the Mafraj, smoked hash, listened to Radio Cairo on a rustic set, talked more, a few fell asleep, and at midnight took a stroll under the full moon.

-Letter Home, November 22, 1978

I’d met the Haj’s son in a Cairo coffeehouse and I became a regular customer there just to chat with him. When I learned he was from the oasis I asked him to write me a letter of introduction. I remember finally getting to the family house in Gharghur on the back of a donkey cart from the bus stop in Al-Jadida. When the Haj saw me getting off in front of the door, he played very cool. Even before reading the letter he asked, How did you get here so fast?

Nude ascending a pyramid n°2

Climbing the Great Pyramid is technically illegal but worth any trouble involved. Last year two CASA students were arrested trying to climb it naked- taken to jail with no clothes…There truly is a lot of life and history in Cairo.

-Letter Home, Summer 1978

Some CASA students had other ideas of a prank. I remember during one particularly boring classroom exercise when in my recitation I tried to provoke Professor Hassanein, a Doctor of Philosophy in Medieval Arabic Grammar, by mixing up the Classical language’s finished case endings with Egyptian Colloquial’s unfinished mush mouth, kind of like mixing Henry James and Mark Twain in the same sentence. I would probably have had a better result reciting in the nude. Hassanein expected nothing less from me, his worst student that year.

The hours with professor hassanein

My Reading & Writing teacher is Professor Hassanein, 6 hours/week, my old TA from Princeton, a bear of an Egyptian, 6’3”, rotund, a tall conk of hair over his forehead, a toothy laugh and an unforgettable crosswise sense of humor and logic, rare at AUC. I met him first in 1974, he invited me to his graduate student apartment to eat his wife’s chicken and rice while his children played in the clothes hamper. I’m lucky he’s still my teacher.

-Letter Home, October 5, 1978

I’ve stayed in touch with Professor all these years, not long ago we met again in the AUC garden and he said he needed some quick help, he hosted a live radio show to discuss American culture, I guess the station hired him on the strength of his American PhD even though it was in Medieval Arabic Grammar, and he didn’t know what to say when it was next to air, so he asked me to tell him about a novel on the American bestseller lists, and I summarized Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, which I hadn’t read either but I’d just seen the movie, so he scribbled notes while I recounted its three stranded plot. His final question for me, Is it Comedy or Tragedy? I didn’t hear his show but it couldn’t have been worse than playing with dirty clothes.

Prayers for...peace?

Last night I watched TV in a coffee house in Sayeda Zeinab, a Peace News show with old highlights from Camp David and then Live Broadcast from the South Lawn, they jeered when Begin put on his yarmulke to pray and hooted when Sadat kissed Rosalynn, he’s got a reputation of being an old goat…afterward I went to the Moulid of Sayidna Hussein- tonite is the last and biggest night so I must go back- with massive crowds of peasants and street people, hash and incense mixing with wild Sufi music sawed on two string viols, dancers twist and shake and fall into each other’s arms, gasping, shoulder to shoulder with wailing, flailing women, candy vendors and noisemakers and paper hat sellers, whores were working the crowd, the first I’ve seen obvious street walkers in Cairo…all this coming just hours after Jimmy Carter asked us to pray for peace, these people were obviously praying for something else. In Sayeda Zeinab I’d been wondering where everyone was. This is the answer.

-Letter Home, March 1979

The Moulids of Egypt by J.W. McPherson (1866-1946) was my Sufi bible that year, truly the best underground guide to some funky Egyptian stuff. As he wrote about the Hussein moulid, Dancing girls called Ghawazee seem to have been much in evidence and their modern successors had a meteoric revival reaching their zenith in 1934, when however they did not perform nor accost pilgrims or visitors in the precincts of the mosque but rather in the booths and tents. I beg to disagree, in 1979 the Ghawazee were still going strong, accosting pilgrims and visitors in the open, Jimmy Carter’s prayers be damned.

Sayeda Zeinab Mosque lit for its Moulid

Fun at the tanta fair

At 6am I’m off for Tanta a large city in the Delta forty five minutes by train, the saint’s festival, Moulid of Sayyid Ahmad al-Badawi is celebrated this week, the biggest religious celebration in Egypt and legendary for the amount of hashish smoked in its frenzied festivities, dervish mystics dance til they drop and Grand Shaikhs puff themselves more than usual to recite the Quran in one breath.

-Letter Home, October 14, 1978

According to McPherson’s Moulids of Egypt, …I am assured that the crowds amount to more than a million…Tanta’s mosque precinct has many public circumcision booths but no secular attractions unless tattooing be so regarded. But if one follows the multitudes to the outskirts one reaches a perfect city of tents, theaters and improvised dwellings through which one can wander for hours. Several years ago (1938) at dawn from my hotel window on the square I saw a peculiar sight, a sort of harmless burlesque, the Zeffa al-Sharameet, Procession of the Prostitutes, with their admirers and much music, song, and mixed dances of a pronounced character, and other unseemly things.

About fifteen years after my first visit to the Tanta moulid I had occasion to return as part of my evaluation of a USAID-funded Family Planning Project, to inspect the booth erected by the Ministry of Health to promote contraceptive use. Needless to say that this most boring booth was empty, except for the children racing in to grab free handouts which they blew into balloons to have more fun at the fair.

Take me to Cairo, show me everything

Professor Hassanein told us about his school friend from the village, smartest and first in his class, who stole money from his stepfather whom he hated, bought all his friends imported Pepsi Cola, then jumped in a taxi and told the driver, Take me to Cairo and show me everything (at age 7 mind you), he was sent to reform school and later married a beggar. Hassanein met him again years later, after he’d gotten his Doctorate at Princeton, in the streets of Cairo selling sodas.

-Letter Home, December 13, 1978

Hassanein told a lot of these fish out of water stories, in fact he himself lived one as a village boy who showed academic promise and ended up at Princeton in 1974, trying his best to keep his Egyptian Colloquial mush mouth out of the precision of the Modern Standard Arabic he was supposed to teach us. But he couldn’t always help it- You can take the boy out of the countryside but you can’t take the countryside out of the doctoral candidate- and he would sometimes let slip the village-ism, Mish Kidda? Isn’t it so?, at the end of an otherwise classically wrought sentence, instead of what he should have said, Ma hadha ka dhalika shay’un? Isn’t this like that thing?, which if you say fast comes out of the mouth as a peasant would talk, with the Negative particle Ma, Not, and the noun Shay’un, Thing, eliding into a single Negation, and everything between mostly swallowed up. Mish Kidda?

What about your courses?

I’m excited about Cairo, and Arabic is as frustrating as ever when literal meanings are so elusive and the sense so simple. I wish I could exercise my intellect (what’s left of it) more and my dictionary less…I expect to take at least two weeks off [to travel to the Western Oases]. Michael [my roommate] was astonished. But Lou! What about your courses?

-Letter Home, April 1979

That is true. What about them? And that dictionary. How else would I have learned, if not from Lane’s Lexicon, that Farafra Oasis, which I visited during that two week absence from my courses, gets its name from the quadriliteral reduplicative verb Farfara, meaning, He (a Camel) Put his Body in a State of Commotion, or Agitation, and its secondary meaning, He Hastened, or was Hasty, with Foolishness, or Stupidity. Voilà.

The theory and practice of driving camels

Still haven’t been back out to the Camel Market since I’ve returned, it only runs Fridays, donkeys are sold Saturdays. I guess I’m only able to write it up [for my Anthropology course] as a narrative of observation/description and skip the theoretical part, the market as a locus of peasant-nomad transactions, or some such garbage.

-Letter Home, April 1979

Al-Hamdulillah I didn’t get too theoretical at the Camel Market. If I had, I would have wasted my time, and Haj Bashir abu Jaib’s time, asking him about the Sand and the Sown, the Cooked and the Raw, High Islam and Low, and other semi-absurd binary paradigms invented by Western anthropologists to describe how some people just want to move on and others just stay put. Who was to say if KhairAllah was a mover and not a stayer? Abu Jaib wanted to talk to me about John Wayne, not Claude Lévi-Strauss.

The other night in cairo

The other night I set out alone on foot for the old quarter near the ancient mosques, the bazaars, streets with no names. I got lost- and found many things 1) I can’t understand directions in Arabic. One guy took me by the hand and led me the whole way 2) Street planning in Cairo is non-Euclidian, parallel lanes and alleyways often crisscross, what seem like perpendicular avenues never intersect 3) Cairenes are all colors 4) Nothing physically dangerous, no violent crimes but of passion 5) Watch your money…1 Egyptian Pound = $1.40, a good size loaf of bread costs less than a penny, two years ago people rioted because they were to raise its price, the government changed its mind.

-Letter Home, August 1978

By the end of that year in Cairo, my enumerated list had run into the triple digits.

Chair, glass, letter of credit

Every common domestic vocabulary word I must learn. Chair. Bed. Glass. I already know things like Balance of Payments. Defense Budget. Letter of Credit.

-Letter Home, August 1978

If only that year I had learned the words for Castrated Camel, Sore Hump, and Bone Tired, I would have had more to say five years later to KhairAllah on the Darb al-’Arba’een.

Sharing the sauce

“[ ] used to eat from my plate, and I his. He was truly with us. He knew our secrets. He knew our lives. He knew everything about us,” [ ] said.

-Washington Post, February 27, 2021, one Arab describing his fictive kinship with another

There was little talking when we all crouched round the aseeda bowl. The unsaid trick was to pick the side of the circle with the most sauce. Millet paste is dry and to go down needs to be lubricated by Milaah, made from onion and dried vegetable powder fried in peanut oil. You ate with two fingers, maybe three, depending if Adam Hamid that day cooked it thick or thin. When I saw him years later, KhairAllah laughed most when imitating how I ate. He pantomimed me at the bowl, slowly sticking out one finger from his closed fist, then another, then a third, counting Wahid, Itnayn, Thalata in the voice of an imbecile, then putting all three fingers into his mouth and making a disgusted face.

Je suis la plaie et le couteau/I am the wound and the dagger

Je te frapperai sans colère/Et sans haine, comme un boucher/Comme Moïse le rocher/Et je ferai de ta paupière,//Pour abreuver mon Saharah/Jaillir les eaux de la souffrance.

I shall strike you without anger/And without hate, like a butcher/As Moses struck the rock/And from your eyelids//I shall make the waters of suffering gush forth/To wet my Sahara.

- The Man Who Tortures Himself, Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire (trans. Wm. Aggeler)

John on the ford

Sadiq abd al-Wahab was Haj Bashir’s agent in Nahud and he had the job of getting Daoud and me started on the Darb. We’ve never ridden camels before, we told him. Maa Shaa’a Allah, What God has Willed, Sadiq answered. We went out to the well flats to meet the drovers and KhairAllah, with Sadiq’s Nuba driver John at the wheel of his Ford pickup. Sadiq sacrificed the sheep and we ate roast meat in a Goodbye, Good Luck Ceremony while John sat on the hood. I gave him my Sarah Vaughan Greatest Hits cassette and still I wonder if he listened to its last song, Thanks for the Memories.

©David Melody

John on the Ford ©David Melody

Na'eeman

I never had occasion to use the expression Na’eeman!, Comfort!- whose answer is, Allah Yin’am ‘Alayk, May Allah Give Comfort to You- which we were taught in our Egyptian Arabic class is said to compliment a new haircut. The same N-’-M root also gives the word Na’am, with a double meaning- the first the interjection Yes!, the second the noun Livestock. I guess that a newly roached donkey qualifies for both.

©David Melody

What they carried

They came to Cairo by camel with tea kettles and cook pots, saddles and bridles, goat skins and jerry cans, stuff bags and blankets, and returned to Kordofan carrying the same, by lorry and railroad and ferry boat, then by another train and another lorry, back to where they’d set out. I wonder what the train engineer and ferry captain asked them. Where are you going? From where are you coming? They answered…to Dar al-Kababish [Home of the Sheep Keepers]…from Umm al-Dunya [Mother of the World].

Before, in Kordofan ©David Melody

After, in Cairo ©David Melody

tea at dawn

Qirba, a Waterskin made of a whole goat, comes from the verb Qaraba, to Be Near, which gives the noun Qarab, a Night’s Journey to Draw Water, and the active participles Qaarib, One who Seeks Water at Night, and, more strangely, Muqrib, a Woman, a Mare, a Goat, a Ewe, or an Ass [and expressly, Not a She-Camel] Near to Giving Birth, all meanings from Lane’s Lexicon. One waterless night KhairAllah appointed Masood as our Qaarib to make the Qarab to fill a Qirba so we could drink tea at dawn.

©David Melody