Khawajas like moulids too

The Tanta moulid was a hassle to say the least. Familiar county fair setting, side shows, peanut galleries, piaster (not penny) arcades, no freaks unfortunately, thousands of villagers swarming. I caused a stir, a foreigner in a strange land at a very strange time. I couldn’t lose the street brats, the noise and confusion drove me off. Why even leave Cairo for a bigger mess? There is bound to be one next door.

-Letter Home, October 19, 1978

I did a lot of that, like a moth to a flame, jumping in with both feet, knowing full well I’d be burned just like last time. I thought the bigger the crowd I joined, the faster I’d learn to speak their language. But the word I learned best, in all its intonations, inflections, and registers, was Khawaja, which in any case is not even an Arabic word.

Somebody else

Je vous souhaite des estomacs moins en danger que le mien et des occupations mois ennuyeuses que les miennes. So wrote Rimbaud to his mother from Aden. I pulled his Correspondence off the shelf in the library (it was right beside my head) and found Rimbaud the kid poet turning into a disgruntled and desperate traveller, a pioneer of the fringe. He signs his letters home as simply “Rimbaud” and wrote, The only country more boring than this is yours. But even his laundry lists attract me more than the “finest” of the modern Arabic drama we read in class.

-Letter Home, October 19, 1978

Rimbaud called himself Somebody Else when a fellow passenger on the steamer to Aden asked if he was Rimbaud the poet. He was on his way to Harar up on the Ethiopian plateau via Tadjoura and Lake Abbe where I went later. The farther away from Paris he went, the more he complained. Heat, unclean water, flies, varicose veins. He wrote to his mother to send him special stockings. And he sounded a bit like me in Cairo that year, complaining about class, classmates and roommates, the Americans on my good days and the Egyptians on my bad. As much as I tried, I never became somebody else.

Āsif in a zahma

I walked down the Muski last night, that very busy shopping street, fewer people than usual because of the black out but mostly business as usual under gas lanterns, the crowd moved in slow motion and I almost floated through. I was very light headed, maybe because it was twilight but a good feeling and I was happy to be where I was. I wait a long time for moments like that, but I wish I’d had some hash to smoke.

-Letter Home, November 5, 1978

In Cairo, in a slow-moving Crowd, a Zahma, me just going with it, me just pushed by it, was like a tree in a lava flow burning to ash, a glacier stone scratching all in its path, a big wave surfer hotdogging in froth. If you didn’t mind stepping on people and saying, Āsif, Āsif…Sorry, Sorry.

Welcome to my kābūs

Last night I took my dictionary to a bookbinder behind Al-Azhar, wandered around the old quarter off the main drag and saw thousands of hash dealers. The prices aren’t low, the quality is fair, but it’s fun to see so much cash business conducted over greasy tables. At dusk before an orange sky I saw the minarets in silhouette and it really struck me. Despite the crazy traffic and exhaust fumes, the crowds of people are almost invigorating.

-Letter Home, November 5, 1978

I liked the Arabic word for Dictionary, Qāmūs, because it sounded so much like Nightmare, Kābūs. Both were mine, bound in green leather behind the Azhar.

Prince Ja'afar likes groppis

Went to the nightclub but not as seedy as I’d hoped, crummy belly dancing and singing to a lazy Arab orchestra, we sat in the back at the cheapest beer drinking tables, front row is whiskey by the bottle, in between is whiskey by the glass, a Saudi prince was there with his tutor throwing £10 notes on stage drawing much applause. The Emcee kept interrupting the music to toast the People of Saudi Arabia and Prince Ja’afar. The prince wanted the dancer in the blonde wig…News in the paper today that police busted a prostitution ring near Groppis catching many Saudis in the act. I’d like to have seen the looks on their faces.

-Letter Home, November 28, 1978

In Cairo in those days if you told a real estate broker, Simsār in Arabic, meaning Cockroach, that you wanted to rent a Shāqa Mafrūsha, a Furnished Apartment, they would immediately think you wanted to entertain hookers, because so many low rent Saudis did exactly that, unable to afford London or Marbella prices for either the place or the girls. When Michael, Robert, and I told our broker that we wanted to rent a three bedroom apartment, he gave us all a wink. Michael was the best student in our class and could have given the broker at least ten different synonyms for Prostitute, going back to the earliest days of Meccan Islam and forward to the street euphemisms the nightclub Emcee whispered into Prince Ja’afar’s ear.

Of spies and camels

The camel market the other morning at sun up was a treat, slowly filled with hobbled hopping camels, smoked a bit of hash with two dealers, they said they go for £200-350 a head. Just to keep the conversation going I passed myself off as an archeologist mounting an expedition to the Sahara ready to buy 20 camels and hire 10 men. I almost shook hands on the deal before realizing they thought I was serious and they meant and expected business.

-Letter Home, November 28, 1978

I always liked the Arabic word for Spy, Jāsūs, pl. Jawāsīs, which Egyptians pronounced with a hard G instead of a soft J. I liked to say it in the Singular, I liked its Broken Plural, and I liked to slip them both into my coffee house conversations. Not a good idea in Cairo that year, with many doubts about Camp David in the air, even when I smiled. Another word I often called myself in coffee houses was Tālib, Seeker of Knowledge, commonly understood to mean Student. Only later did I learn its rare variant meaning, Seeker of Women. That wasn’t good either.

Making a Hash out of saqqara

I’ve little energy after a ten hour saddle trip to Saqqara, beautiful desert at sunset past Abu Sir Pyramids, later smoking in a date grove with friendly folk sharing tangerines, three hours back after much hash along a canal path, lovely night sky and quarter crescent. We’d started out that morning by wandering near a missile battery, taken to tea with the commander, finally freed but so delayed we had to race to Saqqara, the horse saw the pyramid and thought he was in Giza but couldn’t find his stable. Wrong pyramid! Rode over the 5,000 year old stone floor of the Royal Gallery and I talked the watchman out of shooting us, and we galloped home wide open across the sand following the edge of the sown.

-Letter Home, December 6, 1978

Rereading that letter forty two years later, sounding as I did like some colonial ass in a Flashman novel, I admit I really should have been shot that day, either by a SAM-7 or the antiquities guard, for treading so blithely and so stoned on both Egyptian national security and world cultural heritage.

The mugamma' and me

Yesterday I went to the Mugamma’, a familiar scene from a bureaucrat’s nightmare, down long halls being led from office to office by heads with progressively grayer hair, working my way to the top, finally to sit before the Big Cheese himself, he tells me I’m in the wrong place for what I want but invites me to drink tea anyway. I accept.

-Letter Home, October 5, 1978

My apartment on Qasr al-’Aini Street was a five minute walk from the monstruous Mugamma’ Building on Midan al-Tahrir where they offered free Arabic lessons if you went in and rode the elevator to any random floor and asked a question like, Who do I see to get permission to do [x]. Everything a foreigner did in Egypt in those days needed special permission and every Egyptian bureaucrat assumed there was an office somewhere in the Mugamma’ to ask for it, so in order to practice your conversational Arabic, all you had to do was to go door to door and say, Minfadlik Ya Sidi Ana Ayyiz…, Please O Sir I want…

Sang the bird to the spider

Professor Hassanein has a crazy sense of humor in class. Today he made us laugh when he told us his blind Shaikh at Al-Azhar ate like an animal but recited the Quran like a song bird.

-Letter Home, October 14, 1978

I knew all about song birds reciting the Quran. During Ramadan they erected Tajwīd, Quranic Recitation, tents in the streets and I heard the famous Abdul Bāsit Abdul Samad recite in Tartīl, Singsong style, a word that comes from the same triliteral root that gives the nouns Ratl, Railroad Train, and Rutailā’, Daddy Long Legs. I still have the tape I bought that night from his Merch table and can still hear him tooting and skittering through the Quran.

In saqqara, Same old story

The ride to Saqqara was excellent, the stable owner gave us fast horses and new saddles and sent us without a guide, along the canal the scenes of daily life soak back in, a lot of easy going greetings and children shouting, Baksheesh! Same old story.

-Letter Home, February 26, 1979

The same old story in the country side was much preferable to Cairo’s. Nothing easy going about that place. Even the horses wanted out. Having big Khawajas on their backs would have felt like heaven compared to pulling heavy loads amid the car exhaust and blaring horns. No Baksheesh for them stuck in traffic between Bab al-Louk and Bab Zuweila.

What was i smoking that day?

I had a nice day, ate a huge hamburger and french fries and a chocolate sundae…I almost punched an Egyptian behind the cash register in the nose, all smiles telling me one price then over charging me by £2, I got back to the apartment before realizing, anger and frustration had been building up for a variety of reasons, I went back and started screaming at him in Arabic...I challenged him to fight and he backed down but I was still smoking, another separated us and paid me back what he owed…honestly I was ready to kill the kid, but the question remains, How to let off steam in this city? I am simply a prisoner of Cairo.

-Letter Home, October 11, 1978

Wow. The Fall semester had just started and already I was practicing my Jussive and Imperative and Indicative Moods- Would that I F※※※ Your Mother, F※※※ Your Mother!, Your Mother is a F※※※. I apologize to him now for not instead quoting execration poetry from the Court of Harūn al-Rashīd in Arabic’s Golden Age, or at least a verse of more recent vintage- Your works have proven ugly, Your face is darkest black, And we will yet set fire To your bottom and your back [translation not mine, much cleaner than original]- but getting ripped off and getting mad about it is not the time for a lesson in literary history.

mucous membrane mouth

I can see now that unless I educate myself outside of the Arabic I learn in the classroom I shall be frustrated by what I deal with on the street each day…I get down to reading the Arabic newspapers and wonder if this is the best way to study, but learning by osmosis doesn’t work in this dusty city where the mucous membranes are immediately clogged with sand and dirt.

-Letter Home, July 2, 1978

My first year textbook, consisting of paradigm upon paradigm of weak verb conjugations and broken plural declensions, was from the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, the so-called British school for spies in Shemlan, Lebanon. Not until my fourth year did I have a dialect textbook, in my case Egyptian, but it was in English transliteration that did nothing to connect the Classical to the Colloquial, which would have made it easier to learn. It was doubly frustrating when I’d read cartoon captions in newspapers or dialogue in plays or novels written in the Egyptian vernacular and I’d have to sound out the words like a kindergartener. That disconnect was yet more linguistic sand in my mouth that year.

Oblivion here is not a bad thing

I’m supposedly already an old hand around Cairo yet I still get lost and can’t understand or be understood, but oblivion in this city is not such a bad thing…Bring dresses below the knee, Egyptian men appreciate more what they cannot see…Look for the one wearing diapers at the airport when you land.

-Letter Home, July 18, 1978

I wasn’t wearing diapers at the airport that day but I was just as easy to spot in the crowd. I’d left the hospital one day before and must have looked like a ghost, gaunt and drawn. What have they done to you? I was asked. Nothing. This is how oblivion looks in Cairo.

I can say Shish kebab

The city still amazes, frightens, and makes me lose my way, but I’m getting better at asking directions and people say I speak excellent Arabic when I do, which of course is a lie, but I can get around in general and in restaurants I’m served the food and drink that I’ve asked for.

-Letter Home, June 28, 1978

I remember going out to lunch on the hottest day that summer with classmates at a kebab and kofta restaurant in Bab al-Louk and asking for a pitcher of water- I had to ask someone how to say the word for Pitcher- which I drank straight down with the waiter standing right there when a sudden bloom of perspiration poured out of every pore in my body and my fine cotton shirt became sopping wet and he said, Allah huwa Akbar.

Like a pyramid pulled along by a thread

A sign in Arabic and English in the SwissAir office- All proper millionaires sometimes live in a chalet in the Swiss Alps…For as low as £42 per day, Why not you?- But I won’t go anywhere until I learn some everyday vocabulary. I can read the headlines but don’t even know the words for knife, spoon, and fork.

-Letter Home, June 28, 1978

On my first day in Cairo I left my suitcase in the AUC student hostel lobby and it was gone when I went to look for it. We had made a pledge to speak only Arabic if possible so I couldn’t explain to the deskman what I was missing- for two years I’d only learned Classical words like Carpet, Palace, and Lamp. I had to ask a classmate who’d already studied Egyptian Colloquial how to say Suitcase, Shanta, which that summer also turned out to be our Sri Lankan drinking buddy’s name. Later in Sudan I learned the hard way that Wehr was wrong, that the word ‘Afsh does not mean both Luggage and Garbage.

Take the breeze and lose yourself

Tonight to walk and take the breeze and lose myself I went to the medieval commercial district Khan al-Khalili, burlap sacks spilling raw safron and incense sellers burning mounds of the stuff, old alleyways not built for modern traffic, two large trucks came face to face in a lane not wide enough for a cart. I stood to one side to watch pedestrians, bicycles, donkeys and autos back up, then someone yelled at me! for being in the way, the foreigner a convenient target but the real culprit is progress.

-Letter Home, June 28, 1978

I was very green in Cairo that June, the month I’d arrived, much greener than I’d be the following June. The Klax- klaxon, the Zahma- crowd, the Dowsha- noise, the Sudā’- headache…bothered me later, when in the streets being called Khawaja, in a whisper behind my back or a shout to my face, made me angry, not like that first June, when if I heard that word- really an epithet for Alien- addressed to me, I felt they thought I belonged in those streets just like them.