July 26

“Egyptians basically have freedom of expression.”

“I mean, apart from a few things, like directly criticizing Mubarak, they can say just about anything they want.”

The pronouncement was so earnest and natural as to make it unclear whether the speaker was employing dead-pan sarcasm or was blissfully naïve about Egypt and totally unaware of the contradictions of the statement itself, even taken apart from the facts. He was an acquaintance of ten minutes who described himself to me as an amateur journalist from Barcelona. Amateur indeed, I thought, if he considers freedom of expression, or its subset freedom of the press, to be essentially respected in a country that allows you to say anything you want – unless it is directly critical of the government.

We were standing together on some electrical transformer boxes on the northeast side of Midan Tahrir, downtown Cairo. We met as all strangers meet, with a meeting of the eyes. Foreigners at political protests in Egypt are prone to looking at one another enquiringly: what are you doing here, making me seem less adventurous and brazen for ignoring the embassy’s warnings not to come? There were many foreigners at this protest, in fact. Since this was a rally in support of Lebanon and therefore not critical of the Eyptian government, it could be expected to be relatively safe.

Our eyes met just after failing to find a way up to the second floor of a building overlooking the square. The Spaniard looked at me, then, as an alternative to the stairs, tipped his eyes toward the transformers laughingly. Not sure if it was a dare or a joke, and equally eager either way, I climbed up, and he followed.

From here we could see the miniscule rump of protesters – five to six hundred in a city of 15-20 million (no one knows for sure how many live in Cairo) – surrounded by twice as many police officers. Usually, uniformed police outnumber protesters four or five to one in Egypt, so this seemed a surprisingly modest and measured show of force. But after the crowds had dissipated I realized it was not: fully one quarter to one third of the “protesters” were plainclothes police officers.

With semi-concealed radios and 8-10” clubs, or simply prying ears, the plainclothes percolate through the protest and mingle with bystanders. Everyone knows this and the police opt not to make a mockery of themselves by trying to keep the undercover presence secret once the protest is over.

Once things had wound down, the uniformed commanders shouted a few orders, waved a few hands, and like droplets of oil coalescing out of the unstable emulsion, hundreds of men emerged from the crowd to muster points in the Midan. They formed what looked like four or five columns of about one-hundred men each. Later, there was one further group of roughly thirty-six stragglers (about nine rows, four men in each row). The sea of people had parted into police on one side and citizens on the other in the blink of an eye.

The gathering of the plainclothes was striking. First because there were far fewer protesters – and far more police officers – than I had imagined. Second, because they drew out of the crowd so quickly. Everything, especially the clubbing and running, seems to happen so fast at a protest. But with the plainclothes, it didn’t look like military discipline or raw, pulsating fear that moved them. Watching them, one had the distinct impression they just wanted to go home. This impression comes from seeing the type of men these are, and the way they act.

The contrast between the boots and the officers is striking. If you had told me before going to the protest that the two were to be different, I would have bet on the bigger, tougher men in the lines, the slighter ones calling the shots.

Why? Because these are our myths. That un-tough men seem to throw themselves into the calmer, more intellectual pursuits, sometimes finding masculinity in control exercised over the lives of others. There is something very creepy about such men, perhaps a hidden homosexuality that causes them to submit others in retaliation for their own submission – which they hate, but towards which they are inexorably drawn. They are the ones from whom you fear treachery. All of the treacherous, deviant animals (metaphors for men) are little animals: the rat, the snake, the fox, the hyena. You do not expect them. Often you do not see them – until it is too late. They could never win in open confrontation, so they resort to connivance, plotting and subterfuge. There is something chilling and reptilian about these men – like the clammy sweat on their pale bluish brows – that makes their capacity for evil far greater than that of a big man. Their oppression flows only from the mind, not from muscle, making it exponentially more frightening. The mind is infinitely more powerful than muscle; the imagination may plunge to depths no mere diver has ever reached.

These are but our myths. They were not true of these men. Here the little ones stand at the front. Most are conscripts. Most are just boys. You could see it in their faces and their bodies, dwarfed under their hand-me-down helmets and vests, which have probably been used by generations of conscripts, beginning even before they were born.

Most of the boys could have gone three days or more without shaving before attracting reprimand from a superior. Many were growing the thin little moustaches that adolescents sometimes grow in countries where they make an early entry into manhood. You never see them in North America where the High School’s keep us boys longer, and the mockery keeps us clean shaven.

The length of these boys’ mustaches testified to the earnestness and desire with which they desired to be men. But will alone would not suffice: they remained soft and straight, like mere hair combed downward from the nose to the upper lip. It will be many years still before they have the attractive roughness of stubble, or the richness, warmth and strength of a full beard.

The officers, on the other hand, are huge. They appear to tower behind their conscripts like giants. They are all big-boned (not meant euphemistically). Many also have bellies bulging out just the right amount to nicely complement their aviator sunglasses. None, however are really fat. They are the baton swinging equivalents of Jeopardy’s tournament of Champions line-up. These look like anti-social, bullying assholes that never would have made it in other calling but one where you had to scream at people and hit them.

At one point, early in the evening, my friend from Kentucky and I push into the crowd to photograph a Lebanese boy perched on a man’s shoulders. I know he is Lebanese, and not Egyptian, because of his beautiful, long eyelashes. He wears what for a boy of his age in North America would be a Karate-Kid headband. Except on this band the rising sun has bled out into the white fabric, making the band solid red. Magic-markered on top is an Arabic slogan I cannot read. He has a Lebanese flag tied around his shoulders and is waving another in his right hand. In his left hand he has a toy M-16 (There is no such thing as a toy Kalashnikov, but that hasn’t stopped children from playing with them).

We wander over to the line of little men. They encircled the entire crowd of protesters and with bent arms interlocked at the elbows prevented the crowd from moving at all, let alone marching. This uterus-of-the-State was two to six rows thick, depending on the location. It soon began to operate like a diode: the arms would part for anyone in the middle who wanted to leave, but not for anyone on the outside who wanted to get in. By gently squeezing in on the crowd, the police where able to whittle down the size of the protest over the course of the evening.

I stood face to face with a similar line once in Ottawa (I missed the anti-globalization boat, despite being close to both Seattle and Quebec City at the right times). There, the closer I got, the more intimidating it was. Canadian riot police are accessorized to bionic levels, have expressionless faces, and stand in geometrically perfect formations. Their inhumanity is all the more chilling for its aberrance in Canada: we actually have guys like this? It’s like they brought them out of the freezer just for this event, and will shortly put them back in to preserve them for the next protest, scheduled to take place in three years.

In Egypt my impression was reversed. Riot police here never walk; they run everywhere. Their approach is thus announced by the chilling sound of 200 heavy-soled boots hitting pavement synchronously. The sound tightens a spot deep in my gut, somewhere between the navel and the pubic bone. And I like it, because I think, “this is it man, this is it”, and I feel like crouching down and touching the bare earth before making my move. It all happens so fast.

But now they were not running, but rather standing in a kind of loose, undisciplined formation. And the closer I got, the less I felt that these people could club me to death. They yawn. They look around. One man’s cupped hand moves down to readjust himself in his pants (maybe his mind was wandering to the places it does when one must stand at boring events for hours on end).

We see their eyes. They are expressive, which makes them human. They look alternatively bored or scared. I’m not sure how I can tell this. Their eyes are not like the eyes I am used to staring into. Staring into them is like sighting through peep-sight: at the centre of a white background lies a black circle. I cannot distinguish the iris from the pupil. I think it is the size of the white that I see that tells me they are scared or tired: it is an estimation of how far back the eyelids are pulled, or how heavy and drooping they look.

Yet I am not totally reassured: scared and bored creatures can be among the most vicious. When children are bored, they burn ants with magnifying glasses. Were the kids of Columbine vicious or scared and bored? Lindy England and Charles Graner were just bored. Fear leads to disproportionate responses, and boredom to imagination and the employment of the devices in one’s control.

I would see that this was true later when some psychological tension crystallized suddenly and their was a bout of clubbing and running. No one could tell why it started – it happened so fast. I was up against the waist-high wall of the stairs down to the metro talking to a middle-aged human rights lawyer who trains activists. She tells them what their rights are when they are arrested and the like. But she said, “interestingly, a lot of the NGO’s are asking for more practical advice”. Of course: a pair of running shoes, a phone call to the right person, and techniques for resisting torture are more useful in avoiding problems here than knowledge of one’s due process rights.

The hitting erupts right in front of us, sending people flying like sparks from exploding fireworks. She mumbles “oh, shit” and scurries off to the right. Now the human rights worker is taking off – is this my cue, I wonder? I jump up on the wall and ready myself to jump down 12 feet onto a stairway leading into the metro if necessary, but it subsides. Then the gate to the metro is closed and I imagine what would happen if a crowd of people tried to escape down with the gate closed.

You would only notice one or two steps in. By then, those behind would be falling and pushing and the whole crowd, not knowing the gate is closed, would keep converging on the stairway, pushing the front line until they hit the mesh. They would then try to climb up a few feet, and back over the heads of those who would continue to be compacted down the stairs against the gate.

Better not try and escape the next explosion by jumping, I think. It was after this that I made my way to the building, to try to view the crowd from a safe distance. On the transformer, peering over the crowd, I said to my Spanish journalist friend:

“How can you say that there is adequate freedom of expression in this country when these people, gathered here to express themselves, are being squeezed and totally contained by riot police?”

“Oh, well, en espanol we call this “libertad de associacion”, rather than “libertad de expresion,” he answered me.

“Igual en ingles,” I replied, adding, however, that I thought his notion of freedom of expression was too narrowly constrained to freedom of the press. Even at that, it did not impress me. Are newspapers to palliate us with endless entertainment and sports columns?

This was neither in difference in language, nor a European-North American difference. I thought of the phrase popular in the European Court of Human Right’s jurisprudence on section 10 of the European Convention: freedom of the press is the “watchdog of democracy.” The fifth column naturally sets itself up – or where it does not, it should – as an adversary to government. It is the gadfly of the society too large to be kept in line by a single ambulatory philosopher.

My frustration was with the failure of categorization. Categories, in law especially, aid in comprehension and ease analysis. Often, like much of legal process, they are gross oversimplifications made necessary by limitations in the human ability to know, understand, and reason.

In short, variety and possibility are infinite whereas we are finite; our lives are more complex than we are. Or: the human brain cannot understand the human brain. So we must use categories to translate ourselves to ourselves. We cannot understand phenomena for which we ourselves are responsible without simplifying them through caricature (i.e. category).

The categories are unavoidable and more than that, useful and enlightening, but they are not things unto themselves. My Spanish friend, however, had swallowed them whole. Now he could look at a country with a fetid political climate and say that there was no real problem with freedom of expression, but perhaps there was one with freedom of association.

The failure of categories was mostly directly proved in the second half of the night, which I spent talking to police officers. I spent the first half amidst the protesters, recording their thoughts on the events. Many spoke English, and seeing me with a pad they thought I was a journalist. One woman came over to speak to me, or shout as it turned out.

“Look at how they are pushing closed the circle. Look at how the police are pushing us. This is democracy in the Middle East. I am outraged.”

I looked around. I wondered if the police understood what she was saying. If I sympathized, even nodded my head, I was afraid I might be “corrected” with a baton. I kept looking at the woman, who was about my mother’s age I think, and taking notes silently.

“Tell your people abroad that Bush and Blair are creating terrorism here. My children, when they see other children slaughtered, they are so angry. I am sure half of our country will join Al Qaeda.”

“Tell them to stop the bombing. We don’t want your bullshit aid, just stop the bombing.”

This capacity to criticize both her own country and the West in the same breath gave a complexity and texture to the message that wasn’t present in the slogans chanted by the crowd. This I liked. The woman was a person of thought. And her conviction impressed me. Her face was red and veins were bulging in her temples and neck. This wasn’t tear gas and adrenaline, this was her life, and her children’s lives.

She told me to tell the people in my country, and so I am telling you.

I met another young man with a poster in English and Arabic. He translated some of the slogans for me. They don’t have quite the nuance, but slogans never do.

“Hosni Mubarak sad el nom”, or wake up. “Hosni Mubarak el abdallah”, a sell-out. (That means a sell-out to the USA, Ezz adds, just to be sure I understand).

A chant of “Allah Akbar” erupts from the crowd spontaneously and carries on for a few minutes. I’ve got that one, no need to translate I say to Ezz.

“Ya Nasrallah, Ya Habib, dammar Tel Aviv”, which means Nasrallah, our friend, destroy Tel Aviv. They chanted the same thing when the war in Iraq was beginning, but with Ya Saddam, ya habib, he tells me.

These people must be mad if they’re calling Saddam and Nasrallah their friends, I thought. Their perception of reality is completely warped. They are the other, the militants who will never understand me, and whom I will never understand. But I realized: the reason they chanted it with Saddam in 2003 and with Nasrallah now is because Habib and Tel Aviv rhyme in Arabic. It’s just a slogan. It’s meant to be provocative. Protests are not debates.

I realized the importance of this point later when I was reading Yahoo news. The report was on a similar rally in front of Al-Azhar Mosque. Al-Azhar is the oldest university in the world, pre-dating the early Italian and Spanish and English universities by several hundred years in most cases. However, like most things in Egypt, it’s days of glory are faintly remembered relics of the past. I have heard it still functions, but the Al-Azhar name belongs in the Egyptian museum in Midan Tahrir along with the Sphinxes and sarcophagi. Maybe one day the University will again be worthy of that great name, and its students will be able to march on the museum and reclaim what is rightfully theirs.

The piece reported that the chant I have translated above was chanted by the crowd. There was no explanation, it was merely stated as a fact. Facts speak for themselves, right? I’m not so sure. What do endlessly looped newsclips, of dead people or explosions teach us? They are facts, but we do not have the tools for assimilating them. To me this kind of news is like reading the phonebook, except that it is entertaining. All of those numbers, all of those facts, exist, but mean nothing to me until I must call on one of them. I will never remember them all since they appear random and unconnected to me. Some web of meaning – such as my network of friends and family – could allow me to assemble and remember those that are important to me. Taken in bulk, however, the material is overwhelming and unhelpful – totally unhelpful.

So it was with this news piece. The fact that people chanted “Ya Nasrallah, Ya Habib, dammar Tel Aviv” tells very little on its own. It is a more violent choice than “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido” as a chant, but it is not a spoken sentence, and cannot be seen as a quotation.

Later I did speak with some people and they frightened far more than the chants did. I asked what they thought of Hizbollah. I had told them what I thought: that they sadly dragged their whole country, much of it unwilling, into a conflict that would bring only suffering to all. The one fellow replied:

“It [Hizbollah] is nice. Every day they kill at least two. I think if they get more, everyone, not just me, will be very happy.”

I write this down, then ask, “what do you think of this protest?”

“I think this will stop nothing. I want police to leave people to do what they want. They say we are protecting buildings, property, other bullshit.”

Suddenly he stops. A man is walking nearby us. After he passes, the speaker explains,

“He could be police. Everything is police here.”

I write this down. And pause. Then my friend says,

“It’s nice to get what you want, isn’t it.”

“Huh?”

“It’s nice to get what you want. But that was just a bullshit. Egyptians are not stupid people.”

I realize that he is referring to what he has just said. He means that he has told me what I want. I must have understood from the hands, because seeing the transcription of his words in my notebook later I see it doesn’t give this impression

I think: again! Thank goodness I didn’t tear out that page of my notebook and run off holding it up like a winning ticket at company Christmas raffle. Some journalists might sent it right down the wire to be published, making these people look extreme when in fact they are very reasonable. I was looking for my story: “If they kill more than two everyone will be happy” is a great boxed quotation.

I ask if he means that he does not believe Hizbollah is nice. He replies,

“No, that is a bullshit. It is small compared to what I think.”

And our conversation ends with me staring at him, wondering what it is, exactly, that he thinks. But I can’t see tell his iris from his pupil, and I feel like without that, I’ll never know.

The second half of the evening I spent talking with police officers. I first tried to talk to the guys with interlocked arms, the ones who were my age or younger. I asked a couple in Arabic where they where from and how old they were. They wouldn’t talk. I got only one to tell me he was from Alexandria. At first many seemed to not realize I was talking to them. Either I didn’t realize I wasn’t supposed to talk to them, or didn’t realize that they weren’t supposed to talk to me, but they looked as if they had been awakened from their wandering mental state by a slap when they realized I wanted to talk to them. Their faces would go suddenly stern like real military men. But still they showed their age: their eyes would drop and avoid mine rather than staring proudly ahead.

So I tried the officers. Many of them spoke English, but unlike the protesters, they did not come to me to talk – I had to go to them. I opened with the first officer by asking him what he thought of the protest. Wrong. They don’t have opinions on the protest; they are there to do a job.

I said, “May I ask you factual questions”. He nodded. “How many police officers are here tonight?” Wrong. That information is part of the job we are here to do and cannot be disclosed. “Five hundred?” I ask. He smiles and shrugs. Later I would meet another officer and say “One thousand?” He gave a nod that somehow told me I was getting warmer. I never had the chance to try fifteen hundred. But I’d have know if I was over, because they would have given a different nod. When people cannot confirm or deny the veracity of a fact, chances are its true. If it is actually untrue the temptation to negate is too great to be contained.

“Am I in danger here as a Westerner?” No he says. I had asked this question at another protest about two weeks earlier when I started taking pictures. I asked a protester with whom I was walking and his reply was disconcertingly vague. “Take them,” he simply said.

In the course of the night we met a number of officers, all of whom were friendly, and many of whom joked with us and offered us cigarettes. I did not accept the cigarettes, but they sure seemed nice to offer.

There was one particularly large fellow. Mustachioed, but not in the Turkish/Arabic style. More like a route 66 traffic cop. He typified the description I gave earlier and I suspected he would survive at least the first two to three rounds in an ultimate fighting ladder tournament. He was a mean mofo.

I went over and asked in Arabic if he spoke English. He replied in English that he did. As it turned out his English was impeccable. This immediately threw me off. It was like seeing the lovely, perfect handwriting our roughest guide, Bill Rankins. Bill Rankins had been in the Pen on at least one occasion. His handwriting was too pretty to come from a man like him. Similarly, the officer’s English was unsettling because it couldn’t emanate from someone in the category in which I had already placed him.

He was very nice, and oh so polite. He saw the bag slung across me had a Canadian flag sewn on and said,

“I have a friend from Edmonton, Alberta, here in Cairo.” He began telling me about all the wonderful things they did together. How could a man with a friend from Edmonton Alberta ram a baton into skulls?

“You see that we are here unarmed tonight.”

“But it is not like that at other protests,” I reply. “Could I be beaten if I attended one of those protests?”

“No, we have instructions not to harm foreigners.”

Pause.

“But if you are in the middle of – excuse me – that shit [referring to the body of the protest] doing something, then you can expect something too.”

As my friend from Kentucky put it later, even oppression has a human face.

This friend has a spirit that missed its time, and was born too late, and we seem naturally to understand one another. Later, I gave him a leather bound notebook from an ancient atelier de reliure in the Bazaar. I was happy about this because men don’t so often give each other gifts. I haven’t seen anything like it in fifty years, so I wrote “To David Degner, a book from another time for a journalist from another time. Cairo, 2006, +jamie”

You can find photos taken of the protest by David at bloggingcairo.com, posted by me. I have been having trouble posting my photos on here.

From Soweto to the Southern Suburbs of Beirut

The South African townships (especially Soweto, which is primo inter pares) have, as a result of their place in history, acquired a mythical aura. The word itself, especially in the definite plural “the Townships”, is immediately identifiable as referring to South Africa. It is synonymous with poverty, uprising, and the struggle for justice – all nice, easy, powerful metaphors. Yet, the Townships have layers and subtleties that make them awkward to assimilate: they’re not bite-size like Ellis Island, for example. Succinctly: they are not yet museum pieces; they are living communities that still exist.

The Townships have caught the attention of tourists and backpackers – and tour providers. Visiting the Townships is a chance to see the “real” South Africa (or ease the consciences the day after their wine tour in Stellenbosch). Lonely Planet (I don’t know about the Concierge at the Hilton) will tell you just where to reserve a bus that will take you into the township. There, your guide (a bona fide township resident himself) will show you around. Some tours include visiting a family in the township and having a meal with them. At the end of your day, you climb onboard the bus and ride back to the parts of town where the banks have are two guards with pump-action .12 gauges and german-shepherds at the door and the streets are surveilled by CCTV cameras.

When I was in South Africa, I did not take a township tour. And heaven knows, I did not venture into the townships on my own.

I did not take the tour because it seemed to me like a bizarre form of poverty tourism. It seemed voyeuristic and all too easy. By design, it is a painless moral adventure. At its highest, the experience is merely vicarious. In many cases I suspect the visitors do not experience in any way what is significant about the Townships.

Second, there is always something off-putting about participant observation. What I mean is that it is much tidier to become acquainted with and visit things that are finished, such as Nelson Mandela’s prison, Ellis Island. This is the usual approach; our paradigm of visitation and of study operates in the past tense. We visit pyramids, not construction sites. Visits to living things connote that they are museum pieces. The insult is quite real, in many cases, since we only know one way of observing things, and that is ex post facto.

But there are still people living in the Townships, and their lives suck. Who wants to visit that?

The townships came back to me as a result of a recent conversation with an Oxford M.Phil student in Development (my chosen programme for next year) who is studying Arabic with me here in Cairo.

We were discussing travel to Lebanon at this time of conflict. She came out of the corner swinging at the idea: it’s offensive; it’s insulting; it’s stupidly dangerous; Oxford would call it unethical. She said the last point with particular gravitas. Clearly it should much impress me. Not only did Oxford say so, but I would soon be a student there, either thinking that too, or being told to I should.

In short, to travel with a purpose, such as journalism, might be acceptable, but not to go merely to “check out the war” could never be.

There is, a bit like poverty tourism, a new form of conflict tourism. One could add disaster and protest tourism. How many people at WTO protests are there for tear gas and adrenaline (the soundtrack to their sexy lives courtesy of iPod, which never skips while running from the cops), and how many because they genuinely want to influence the meetings? The banality of urban life is so mind-numbing that young people seek temporary, and (they believe) safe exposure to anarchy, disaster or war just to remind themselves that they are alive.

Last year some students from the Summer Course at the American University in Cairo decided to go to Iraq to “check out the war” after exams. What else is there to do before school starts? Mercifully, they met coalition troops a short time after crossing the border. The soldiers gave them taps on the bum and sent them scurrying back home, undoubtedly giggling to one another about having the coolest story ever. “My summer in Iraq” is about the best material imaginable for picking up in frosh week.

These kids were idiots. Their attitude was wrong. But (as someone with a genetic need to take risks)I began to wonder about what “purpose” one should have in doing dangerous things? What might be the adequate purpose my friend was referring to?

She argued that it was not our place to remain in or enter zones of conflict. Foreign students at the American University in Beirut who wanted to stay as an act of solidarity were offending rather than comforting. Those Lebanese to whom they wished to show their support might not be able to get out because they did not have foreign citizenship or financial means. How would they be happy at some rich American kid giving up their ticket out on a cruise-ship in the name of some naïve form of solidarity?

There is something disquieting about Western countries’ ability to call a time-out on the field of war, obtain certificates of safe-passage, and evacuate their fawn-eyed citizens, trembling like startled woodland creatures, before the killing resumes. I suspect there is a card with this power in the game Magic (e.g. “returns all creatures to hand; can be played at any time”) – but in life?

That, however, is a problem of nationalities and wealth. To refuse to leave when given this chance is in fact a resounding rebuke of that injustice – as long as the consequences are accepted. What is more offensive is the expectation that the Embassy can and always will play the “get out jail free” card. It’s like relying on the existence of the Coast Guard or Search & Rescue as an excuse to be unprepared while boating; on doctors and technology as an excuse for bad health. The Coast Guard and hospitals are indispensable – but it is always preferable to take responsibility for one’s self and rely upon one’s own resources first. The nonchalance and sense of entitlement flowing from nationality and wealth are worse than nationality and wealth themselves, because they are easier to abolish. Indeed, they can be eliminated immediately by fiat of will alone.

That I think deals with the foreigners who choose to stay in contrast with Lebanese who choose to stay. What about when those who possess the means choose not leave while many who wish to go lack them? It is a simple matter of personal freedom of choice. A less loaded example, I think, makes the point more clearly.

Say I am traveling on budget of 25 USD a day. This budget obliges me to stay in very modest, shared lodging. In reality, I want very much to stay in the fanciest hotels. In my dorm room I meet another traveler who tells me that she just sold her business for 200 million USD and is backpacking around the world to find herself. I am enraged: she has the means to stay in all the hotels I dream about, but chooses the same roach-motel that I am forced to stay in. Can I blame her for this choice, and ask reproachingly: “why do you stay here when you don’t have to? It is not your place.”

Just as every person has a different tolerance of discomfort and uncleanliness in their accommodation, so too does every person have a different tolerance of risk. What seems suicidally dangerous to one, may be quite normal to another (e.g. mountaineering). The coexistence of the fact of differential means and the principle of autonomy or freedom of choice compel me to accept the roach-motel millionaire and the willing refusenik backpackers who are in Beirut as of today.

If that result is repugnant, then one must seek an equilibrium of means, not an elimination of choice. The choice of a person who can leave to stay will not inherently or always be offensive or reprehensible in my view.

However, I don’t think it is a contradiction to then say that there can be enquiry into the basis for that choice to stay in a zone of conflict. The simple statement “yes, you can, but I don’t think you should” expresses how I believe this second, softer line analysis can be accommodated within the first more categorical point that people have a right to stay. The judgement is esthetic, however. One person’s reason may be distasteful, and another’s honourable, but there is no basis there for stopping the former.

My friend from the United States, as I have said, sought to base her judgment on whether there was a “purpose” to being in a conflict zone. Her concept of purpose was essentially articulated around an ethic of altruism: Self-sacrifice (i.e. putting one’s self in the line of fire) is justifiable when it serves others (for example, by educating them about the situation through journalistic writing). Acts of solidarity, the mere desire to bear witness, and (worst of all) any personal sense of excitement could not justify remaining in or traveling to a war zone.

I found this idea of purpose puzzling. Defined in this way, purpose seemed to me a measure of the extent to which an act benefits others (society), but not the self. From the perspective of each person, “society” was humanity minus one – one’s self. But to every person other than me whose view of society is constructed in this way, I am a part of society. Unless I am a solipsist, and without making the argument “6 billion people minus one can’t be wrong”, it seems to me more plausible that I am a part of society, than to say that I am not.

Now, tracing the line of purpose around the sphere of the self makes less sense. Even if the goal is benefiting “society”, I can do so by benefiting myself. For example, my friend would be acting “purposefully” if she did something for me. It seems clear, then, that if I were to do for myself what she would otherwise do for me, from her perspective it must be good. How then, by changing point of view and adopting my perspective could it be bad?

Unwilling to accept that an action could be good or bad merely based on this shift in perspective, I see only one alternative for defending this view of “purpose”. The question become one of impact: If one could do more good when labouring for others than for one’s self, it might be wrong to serve one’s self. Because although in absolute terms a person doing something for himself would do good, he would do less good than if he worked for others. Thus, he would be underperforming, so to speak, relative to the good he could do for the world.

Amusingly, if the same were true of others, then it would also be in everyone’s self-interest to work for the benefit of others since if they did the same, each person would benefit more than if he worked for himself. However, every so-called altruistic act could potentially be rationalized as self-interest. The normative argument is not advanced and the question is transformed to be what is the basic nature of human beings?

Even accepting the utilitarian premise – that good to “society”, where society includes one’s self, should be maximized – there are two stumbling blocks to the “others” orientation.

First, I suspect that people’s efforts on behalf of others are not greater than those on behalf of themselves. On the contrary, I fear that when people are shamed by this ethic of purpose into not doing things for themselves any longer, the result is lethargy. It is a hope – more than a belief – of mine that the positive emotions motivate more than the negative ones.

I could be wrong in my assessment of human nature. I just finished a book about Dr. Paul Farmer called Mountains Behind Mountains, subtitled “A man who would cure the world”. Farmer’s energy exceeds that of any living human being of whom I am aware, with one possible exception in Jim Palardy. He says, about what makes him tick, that “if you’re making sacrifices…you’re trying to lessen some psychic discomfort.” Most of my nuits blanches have been spent with the sword of Damocles hanging over me…

Second, especially when thinking societally, it is difficult to estimate effects. For example, my friend said that in this moment she could have more impact in southern Lebanon by writing her Congressman than by being there. I don’t know, but there might have been better examples: this didn’t seem like an example where a letter would have much effect.

The statement impressed me, however, with its exceeding humility. A young, energetic, driven and intelligent American woman focusing on the Middle East in her studies believed that her biggest impact is through a letter writing campaign to her Congressman. I would have expected her to consider at least possible the prospect of one day becoming a policy-maker, a professor, the next Robert Fisk, or a Congresswoman. Then, remembering the horrors she would have seen with her own eyes in Lebanon, she could act accordingly.

“We know what we are, but we know not what we may be”. It would be an error to excuse one’s self from the present in the name of the future, but, a person’s full impact will not be made in a day. Most powerfully of all, they may reverberate after their death along the walls of the deep canyon of the centuries.

So I am compelled to provide my standard. I have already suggested that there may be good and bad attitudes in making the choice, the good being self-reliance, and the bad being expectation of rescue and sense of entitlement. I would be content – amazed, even – if people simply took responsibility for their actions.

Responsibility requires assumption of risk. Assumption of risk requires understanding and information about the risk one is assuming, lest obliviousness be taken for courage. Laika, the first dog in space was not courageous; Yuri Gargarin, the first man, was. I hasten to add that assuming great risks is not prima facie evidence of not understanding or appreciating them. It may be madness (of a sort), but it is not ignorance or stupidity, although those are very soothing lies.

It is on the basis of that principle that I couldn’t bring myself to respect the students who went to Iraq. It seemed clear to me that they neither understood the risks nor were prepared to assume the consequences for their actions.

In fact, I wondered if one of the reasons they did not take responsibility for themselves wasn’t precisely because they assumed others exist to serve them. Like children at a movie theater who leave the drink and half-finished popcorn on the floor when they would be so easy to carry to the bin, saying “the janitor is paid to clean that up after me”, I wondered if they didn’t go saying “it’s alright, my government exists to take after me”.

There comes a point where it no longer suffices to live vicariously through books, museums or the internet, letting others take care of our education – or lives. When this point comes, many think: now others will live vicariously through me, as I live through others. They become teachers, writers, parents – whatever they wish – and lead meaningful lives because they are depended upon. For them, the progression is from dependence to being depended upon, and not to independence. It’s no wonder, if that is all they knew, as slaves will own slaves if given the chance.

I am indebted to all the teachers I have had – both in and out of the classroom. When I know something that others do not (this experience is infrequent, but has occurred) I have always tried to teach them. But learning, I think, has its own finality distinct from teaching. Learning precedes teaching, and may be justified without it.

This left me asking: who among us is living? How many are in contact with the raw materials of human existence, and how many are devoted to its infinite refinement and recycling? Have you seen a river, a tree, a mountain, or a knife with blood on it? Have you walked or paddled or pulled a trigger? Have you carried a corpse, smelled burning rubber or heard 200 black boots on hot black tarmac?

As Robert Service asks in his poem The Call of the Wild “Have you … ‘Done things’ just for the doing, letting the babblers tell the story”? There is a purpose to things that begin – and end – within the self.

My mind returned to the example of the townships. I still thought it was crass in most cases. But it was the attitude, not the act, which made it crass. Even so, I would, I think, rather see people in Soweto than at the BMV pavilion on the Cape Town waterfront. Maybe one or two them will be moved – even if only by their own preposterousness.

Rather that than what my friend from Oxford would have me do – stick to the places where I belong, where the prices are high and the tourists abound, typing letters to my congressman from my laptop before dinner.

Eating at Banquets

Today was the Arabic Language Institute’s end of year party.

There were little sketches, recitations and performances put by the students who had taken electives – the music elective sang or played ‘ud, the Qur’an and Bible electives read some of their favourite verses, and so on. My group did a short play with word games in colloquial Egyptian.

The gates to the banquet – tantalizingly laid out next to the entrance, and near my table – were flung open after the show. This was mandatory. Egyptians are a ravenous lot and won’t stay for long at any event once the food is served. I am told – for I haven’t yet been to one – that dinner is often served after midnight at Egyptian weddings for precisely this reason.

I have attended several banquets here (they are a favourite for group events, as in North America) and I have noticed three things.

First, Egyptians are as shy about ravishing the banquet as university students in North America. In Canada, all (except university students) hang back a bit from the buffet after the lids are lifted. No one knows just why, but something unknown causes North Americans to want to show that they’re not too hungry, that they’re a light eaters, or that they don’t need the food.

I’m not sure whether it is to be expected or if it is surprising that eating is shunned in an obese culture such as mine. It is a psychological phenomenon roughly equivalent to closing one’s eyes to hide. Weight is seen on the waistline, not the dinner plate. (Although if others never see you eat it might strengthen the case when saying “I never eat – it’s the curse of my slow metabolism”)

One American girl at our table wanted to go for more vine leaves but confessed she was embarrassed: “I don’t want them to think I’m a fatty.” She was thin as a rail. You wouldn’t hear an Egyptian say that, thin or not. (In fact, until today I thought that after about 1970 or grade 5, whichever came first, you wouldn’t hear a North American say “fatty” either).

I should say that this desire not be seen eating is only present in a certain class of North Americans. The Polaroids immortalizing those who a) managed to get their meal free at the 72 oz. steak place (by finishing it) or b) ate the most at Pizza Hut’s all-you-can-eat Tuesday caution me against over-generalizing.

In any case, there is no shame in eating here: the administrative staff swarmed the table like killer bees. The thirty of them could be found in the first thirty-five spaces in line, and I can assure you it wasn’t our politeness that let them go ahead.



Second, banquets are devoured incredibly quickly here. I consider myself, to my regret, a fast eater. I am also a big eater. But I do not rival the Egyptians with whom I have eaten at banquets.

I was generously invited to an end of year banquet of all Cairo Rotary clubs. The speeches seemed interminable. It was shortly after my arrival and about the only words I could catch were “giddan” and “yaani”. Imagine listening to two hours of speeches in which all you understand is “very” and what would translate into Canadian English as “eh.” (for non Canadians, it means something like: “you know what I’m saying?”)

Blah blah very blah blah, eh? (repeat, ad nauseam)

But I was happy to be there and take in this event. You start noticing the neatest little details when you hear people talk without understanding the meaning of the words. It is like music in a foreign language: as pure sound it takes on a different and purely esthetic quality. There are some compositions based on this principle – the sung portions are merely syllables, or consist of counting from one to one-hundred.

I have some recordings of such works by the Pearson College choir (of which I was sadly not a part) and they are very beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that they have moved me to tears. Actually, I have never cried listening to them, but rather than the music’s inability, it was my own that kept them from flowing. Socrates is the only man of whom I know who is said to have been able to move to tears in this way with speech alone. It is said that he was so expressive and rhetorical that he could cause a crowd to cry reciting to them the alphabet!

Perhaps by the time food was served at the Rotary banquet people were ready to leave, but I have never see a whole table of middle-aged people wolf down food so fast. Toward the end of the meal I reached for a plate of salad in the middle of the table. Before I could get it a waiter swooped in and carried it away. Sensing my disappointment, the Rotarian next to me called the waiter to have him bring it back. Embarrassingly, long after everyone else’s plates were cleared, the salad was brought back from the brink of garburator – for me. I didn’t know if it was worse to take it or leave it. So I took it.

I wondered why I ate so fast compared to most North Americans. I think these traits were acquired eating around the campfire and the table of cook-shacks in the Bush. The first axiom – big – is necessary because you enjoy the good meals while you can get them. The second axiom – fast – is a product of the first: you need to get down as much food as possible before others beat you to it, or you have to hit the trail. A good cook (and she is the best) will bury the table in rich dishes, but it still has a way of disappearing quickly.

Only in this context (speaking of how hunters, wranglers and cowboys eat) do I feel like can I quote Louis L’Amour without feeling like I am inviting the rejection of my whole message as fanciful. L’Amour always makes a point in his books where the characters go hungry of saying that those who haven’t eaten in a very long time eat slowly – not quickly – when food is put before them. I, like most, have never verified the truth of that proposition. But I can say that those who expect not to eat for a very long time eat quickly.

I never recovered from those first meals. I still eat every meal like a meal on hunter-change day, or as if it were my last (the latter simile being less accurate, but more accessible). And I cannot waste food – I physically cannot see food wasted. I would sooner eat to the point of pain and lie like a wolf, its belly physically swelled with meat, for three days in rest, than waste. In my mind it may be weeks before I eat again. Of course, this is especially ill-adapted to civilized life: when do we ever miss a meal?

Secretly, I confess to longing to miss one. Adaptation to hardship, strangely, is destructive in times of plenty.

Why do Egyptians eat quickly? It would be wrong to say that Egyptians – at least those at the banquets I’ve been to – run any risk of hardship. Yet there is a little remnant of it flowing in their veins. (A topic I hope to discuss later) Apart from that, I don’t know.

The Bedu, I should say (Bedouin is in fact singular), do not eat as the Cairenes do. When I ate with them in their gardens in Sinai, they would not themselves eat until we had completely finished our meal. I wasn’t sure why. Elizabeth told me that this was traditional hospitality: guests eat first and separately from the hosts, so that they may be offered the best food. Viewed in a certain way, I suppose, you might think the host does not wish to reveal their poverty by what they later eat. Although intended for the guest’s comfort, anyone not moved and put somewhat ill-at-ease by that combination of pride and poverty must have a very small hear indeed. Yet, it fosters something greater than comfort or pity: admiration.

I wondered, however, if the Bedu didn’t just keep different hours. By sundown after a day of hiking I was starved. They, on the other hand, are somewhere between the Spaniards and the Argentinians, and take their evening meal long after dark. Also, though they had had no foreign visitors in one month, I wondered if they didn’t prefer just to be alone. Conversation – difficult though it was at times with my Arabic – was an opening to our continued presence for a time; its cessation unmistakably invited us to retire to our corner of the Garden, leaving the family to eat together, alone.

Third constat re: banquets – important people get served at their seats. I can’t say that I know the buffet to be North American, or European innovation, but I have always thought it couldn’t have any other origin. And everyone knows: you get up and serve yourself at a buffet. A buffet at which you are served by waiters is only subtly different, and yet that seems to me to completely subvert its purpose and attractiveness.

This is one example of a large number of things that are so close but yet so far from home here in Egypt. Generally, imported things have that feeling to them. For you approach them with expectations: a sense of what they should, ought to, or must be. When experiencing something wholly foreign, I am unencumbered by the expectation that it be one way or another. On the contrary, it is sometimes disappointing when it is like something from home. All is new, and exciting to discover.

But when I am told: this is a banquet, and I see that it is not, it can be unnerving. This is why people often experience a greater culture shock in the seemingly familiar countries than in the vastly different ones. Consider Great Britain: they speak English, are white, and like beer, meat and potatoes. It looks like a match made in heaven for any North American. Upon discovering that the British are not like us at all, the shock is all the more profound for the lack of preparation and psychological defences erected against it. Thus, the traveler to Timbuktu is prepared for – and delighted by – the total foreignness of the place, whereas Americans in Oxford invariably (and annoyingly) complain incessantly.

Egyptian cafes provide a better example of what I mean than banquets.

They have some European cafes here, notably Costa Coffee. Mercifully, I haven’t seen a single Starbucks or anything with the word “Seattle” in it. (MacDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Hardees, however, are ubiquitous). There are also a number of Cafes, such as Cilantro, that are home grown but try to be European.

These places come close, but never quite succeed. They are missing that je ne sais quoi perfectionné par les Parisiens, mais jamais exporté. (One exception to that, I am told, may have been Beirut. But the past tense is obligatory in that sentence) It’s like a machine: you might program one to replicate every caress of the fingertip, flutter of the tongue and angle pelvis, but it could never make love. Rather than being warm, human and seductive, the experience is cold, mechanical and frequently unsettling.

At Costa Coffee, cakes are sold whole, rather than pieces. The price in the display case is for a whole cake. If you would like a piece, please divide this price by twelve, roughly. And the items under the glass are not actually for sale. In the great Egyptian tradition, they have been embalmed and sit permanently on display, giving you a shriveled and somewhat unappetizing (but highly durable) sense of what you might get brought out to you if you order a croissant.

The other day I ordered steamed milk at Cilantro (which was on the menu, lest I be blamed of making an unfamiliar request). After about five minutes the waiter came back: sir, we just want to make sure whether you want that steamed milk hot or cold. But hey, I’m glad he checked.

The biggest problem with the cafes is the omnipresence of the waiters. Many cafes seem to have a 1:1 ratio of waiters to people sipping coffee. They maddeningly open the door for you any time you come within a ten foot radius of it, inside our outside the café. If you so much as look in the window to see if a friend is there, or come down from upstairs to talk with someone you know, the three nearest waiters will spring into action and fling the door open, just in case. The very instant you finish the last drop of your drink (sometimes before) the cup is whisked away, leaving the distinct feeling that your every movement was being watched the whole time.

In order to maintain uniform quality, all of Cilantro’s food is centrally packaged (I am tempted to say manufactured). The sandwiches are the kind that come in triangular plastic boxes with expiry dates on stamped on them by the machine that seals them. The salads too. If you order one to stay, they dump it, head first, into a porcelain bowl. All the garnishes, nicely arranged on the top in the plastic container, find themselves buried under a mound of unusually pale romaine lettuce. You are left staring down at a salad that looks like it consists entirely of the base of the inner leaves of the head of lettuce, the ones that are left after you strip off anything responsible for the plant’s photosynthesis. It’s barely cafeteria food really, but it’s some of the most expensive of this genre you can find in Egypt.

In short, it’s sterile. But since most occidentals’ barometers are located in their (sheltered) duodenums, sterility is good.

From Cairo, you go down to Alexandria, or up to Aswan. In Egypt, up is south and down is north: that is how the River Nile flows. This was not hard for me to get used to as Upper Canada and le Bas-Canada were similarly named according to the flow of the St. Lawrence. Encore aujourd’hui, de Montréal on descend à Québec.

I asked around at school about going to Alexandria. “Oh, you mean Alex,” somebody said.

Only the rickety mini-buses and shared taxis leaving from the unpaved lots under the bridge near the Hilton Ramses still go to Iskandaria. All the kids at the American University call Alexandria “Alex”. Saying Alex is to them what acronyms are to the NGO business and vogue-words are to management consultants. “Alex” is Egypt sanitized, simplified and westernized, just the way they like it.

On a recent weekend I took a trip down from Cairo to Alexandria. We took the French train, which is very slow. The Egyptians chose to call their worst train the French train, and their best train the Spanish train, for reasons that are left to the traveler’s imagination. There is no English train, but there is one called TurboTrain. Apart from SuperJet, the buses generally are not named.

Alexandria’s Eastern harbour is protected from the sea by a narrow peninsula that juts out exactly West to East. On the west tip of the peninsula is a citadel named Fort Qaitbey. The citadel was meant as a human complement to the peninsula. The one guards the harbour from invaders, and the other from the waves.

We walked out onto the peninsula to see the citadel. I imagine, although I can’t be certain, that the prevailing winds are northerly there. On that day, at least, there was a strong northerly wind. The Peninsula was being battered, but holding. The fort stood tall and looked not worse for wear, though in reality it had failed long ago. A felucca – let alone a tank or a plane – is sufficient to circumvent it.

If you look closely though, there are signs that the peninsula is failing too. The north side has had to be built up with big blocks of concrete. They are poured with loops of rebar imbedded in them so that a crane can lift them into place.

One day no one will come to put more blocks where the others no longer stand. The citadel will join Cleopatra’s palace, the Great Library and the Lighthouse, at the bottom of the sea: Another fallen Ozymandias in an antique land.

It’s like Blackjack: The player’s only got one advantage, and that’s deciding when to quit. In the long run, the House always wins. The waves are the House in a game we can’t get up and walk away from, and no matter how good our run, the waves will flatten us with patience.

All along the shoreline, on the blocks of concrete, are men fishing. I was speaking in French with Elizabeth and one of the fishermen overheard us and came over. Apparently he had understood some of what we were saying, or at least recognized the language (Many people don’t recognize the Canadian French – just today an American girl at school asked “Are you speaking Argentinian?”).

The fisherman spoke to us in French. I imagined he was dredging up the remnants of grammar school drills. Today, not many Egyptians learn French. It is interesting, however, to see how French has percolated into Egyptian Arabic. Gournal is a newspaper (Journal – J is pronounced G in Egyptian Arabic); kanaba is couch (canapé); dush is shower (douche), mersi is thank you, and so on.

The commonalities between Spanish and Arabic are also interesting. The indefinite article el or al is the same, as are some words. Zeit Zaytoon is Olive oil (aceite de aceituna, at least in Latin America) for example.

One potential parallel I have recently come across is between the Arabic verb ‘and and the Spanish andar. Andar is a flexible word and I never completely understood it, even after my time in Chile. The meaning in Arabic is close to the “to be” sense of andar in Spanish (e.g. Silvia hoy anda por los 23 años). When the Arabic verb was explained to me I felt as though I suddenly understood a branch of the Spanish verb that had been troubling me. Perhaps the original meaning of andar (walk) in Spanish was fused with the Arabic homophone producing the wide range of meaning of the verb in modern Spanish usage.

There are other such oblique parallels. For example a frying pan is sometimes called sarten in Spanish. Pronounced quickly, it’s very close to the Lebanese (perhaps other dialects too) equivalent of Bon Appetit.

Notwithstanding these parallels, the languages remain extraordinarily different. Communication with the fisherman was easier in French than it would have been with me speaking Arabic, but our exchanges remained elementary. Through gringo-style noun-adjective-unconjugated verb juxtapositions we understood that he had been living and working in France.

“Combien de temps ça fait que vous êtes là?” We asked, thinking it must have been a recent thing – that he hadn’t yet had the chance to really pick up the language.

“Onze ans,” our friend replied.

He had been working eleven years in construction in France. His wife and children were back there now, and he had returned to Alexandria for a month to fish on the concrete blocks propping up the peninsula guarding the western side of Eastern Harbour.

He told us he arrived every day midmorning and would leave around sunset. The only real difference between him and the other fisherman on the shoreline is that at the end of the day he ate his fish rather than selling them.

“Ils les vendent?” Without waiting for his reply I deployed the most well-oiled phrase in my underwhelming arsenal of Arabic:

“Bikam il kilu?”

“Ishreen Gineeh,” he replied. Twenty Egyptian pounds a kilo…that’s about four Canadian dollars.

The fish were tiny. I reckoned ungutted it would take 6-8 to make a kilo. Our friend had about 4 in his basket. It was four thirty in the afternoon. Maybe he’d lost his touch mixing concrete in la Banlieue Nord for eleven years, but even doubling his catch would have been a pretty meager day’s wage.

Four Canadian dollars can get you a lot around here, although I can’t say exactly how much, because I don’t know what the Eyptians themselves pay for most things. Let me give you an example.

The other day I had a fresh squeezed orange juice. There are little juice bars all over Cairo. They have large sacks of whatever fruit’s juice is on offer hanging at the entrance. The bars don’t generally have sitting room. Your juice is pressed your juice into a mug and you gulp it down at the counter, pay, and leave. In one and half seconds the mug is rinsed and ready for the next client.

My Aseer burtuan kabeer (large orange juice) cost me four pounds. As usual, I didn’t have exact change, which is a fatal error in Egypt (the worst is with taxi drivers). Somehow they never have change and you end up having to pay five times the price. In this case, however, it lead to an interesting discovery.

The owner opened his till and pulled out about three one-pound notes. For the rest, he had to give me 50 piastre notes (half-pounds), of which he had a wad as thick as Das Kapital. Five pounds says the most expensive juice in that shop was one pound.

An Egyptian, however, can get some mileage out of twenty pounds. Of course, the fishermen have to subtract overhead. Leaving aside the capital investment in the fishing equipment, daily operating costs are mostly of two kinds: bait and tea.

Bait is bought in the morning. It consists of little shrimps caught in nets by other fisherman. Thread a bare, barbed hook through the body of one of the little shrimps and you won’t need anything like the fancy blue fox and pixie lures we pay five dollars for in Canada. A day’s supply might cost a few pounds.

Tea you buy throughout the day. It is impossible for Egyptian men to talk, sit, and fish – that is, to live – without tea. I imagined that perhaps out on the peninsula they would be forced into forbearance. Our friend’s hospitality wouldn’t have it.

He insisted that we have tea. I objected. It might require walking back into town and therefore take a very long time. However, realizing – difficult though it is when accustomed to a certain lifestyle – that in that moment there was no more productive thing I ought to be doing, I accepted.

A silver platter with hot water, sugar and half a dozen glasses was almost instantaneously conjured – there, where we sat, on the peninsula.

Here, the glass is normally filled about one quarter full of sugar before tea is poured. In an effort to avoid returning to Canada a diabetic, my second most ready phrase is “min gheer sukkar,” or, “without sugar.”

You have to keep this phrase well-polished and ready to be drawn and fired any moment, otherwise your tea will be made up and thrust into your hands, after which it would be impolite to protest. I’m so quick Annie Oakley would be proud of me; my tea never has sugar.

We took our tea mostly in silence. I say silence though waves were crashing around us. Silence – in the sense of the opposite of noise – is not the absence of all sound, but the absence of human sound. Nature has her sounds – some of them deafening – but these are not noise.

The forced silence was good, for we speak too much and think too little. I thought of something I had once read about the British concept of friendship – that it consisted of knowing when to leave others alone. I look forward to this over the next two years in England.

Away from the constant noise of Cairo, my mind began to wander. Place me next to the most crushing waterfall, or in the midst of the fiercest electric storm: this is not noise. They clear my mind, wash my soul, quicken my pulse and tighten my sinews. Tight like a strung re-curve bow or an exploding spinnaker flown in heavy winds.

When I see soft, bulging comfort I feel something is missing from it. It fails to inspire me. In its ease, its essence remains unrealized. Some things are made to be pulled taught and to bear forces. It may wear on them, but it is better than preserving them below their dignity.

But I fear more the anger of others in this discovery than I regret my sadness in witnessing it, so I leave be. My sadness is a double-sadness – first at the sight of things wasted, and second (perhaps a more profound sadness) at their innocence in not knowing this about themselves.

The fisherman spoke of how hard he worked in France. He worked eleven months of the year so that for one month he could come back to where he was from. Was that one month made so much better by being able to eat rather than sell his fish that it was worth giving up the other eleven? If he worked in Alexandria eleven months of the year, he probably could not afford to go fishing in France for one month a year, but I wondered if he would mind.

Did he go to France to dream for eleven months of returning to the place he had left? Fulfillment is surely more satisfying after deprivation, but I suspected the real reason was a combination of being able to fee like he “made it” in some way, and the desire to provide his children with opportunities and make a better life.

A small-town boy goes to the big city to muck out a life. Making it consists of that moment when he returns home a prince and spins tales for family and friends about marvelous things only he understands. Only he doesn’t understand them – they are too big – and he doesn’t control them – they control him.

When he comes back to show everyone just how big he made it, he can say what he wants: no one else knows the truth. It’s a marvelous show, although sometimes it can be ruined – say by a father’s visit to the city. In Cry the Beloved Country even the father, on the path to revealing the fraud, cannot resist romanticizing and aggrandizing his existence when the chance comes: on the train to Johannesburg he pretends to have made the trip many times, when in fact it is his first. It’s so alluringly easy to appear sophisticated in the eyes of the unsophisticated.

I wondered how much better – and how much freer – the lives of the fisherman’s children might be in France than in Egypt. Often, the further from the centre the stronger one’s attachment to it.

The most fervently Catholic countries are furthest from Rome. In Europe one thinks of Poland and Spain more than France, Switzerland or Italy itself. Parts of Africa, most of Latin America and the Philippines are in a league of their own. Or, to take a an example from the Middle East, many of the feuds and allegiances at the base of the Lebanese civil war are stronger today in Ottawa and Montreal than in Beirut.

Like Lt. Hiroo Onoda, the outposts have kept the conflict alive long after it perished at home. And the suggestion that it has died (in Onoda’s case, in the form of pamphlets air-dropped by the US military) serves only to strengthen the resolve, and redouble the will to resist – as if to single-handedly prove its untruth.

For a Muslim family living in France, the feeling of isolation and the sense of loss of culture and language may paradoxically strengthen these traditions. The elders in particular may try to circle the wagons as they feel increasingly cut off from their own children and grand-children with whom they are unable to relate, or even to communicate.

The process is inexorable, but full of hemorrhaging. A generation – or a few generations – may be sacrificed along the way. Rarely, I think, would one find that a person genuinely desires to cease to be like themselves and to become like others. Yet that is the only thing that might avoid the upheaval.

There was only one woman among the fishermen. I caught her holding her child in one arm, and her husband’s fishing pole in the other. I stared at her and time imploded on itself, history was short-circuited and a momentary electric arc spanned a gap of millennia, followed by aching silence. Was this her child, or one of the lost sheep of Israel? And the rod a fishing pole or Moses’ scepter?



The silence faded and I awoke from my reverie, which had almost caused me to miss this moment. I quickly switched my brand-new digital camera to video-capture mode so as not to miss the miracle. When after about fifteen minutes the waters had not yet parted, I decided to move on. There were still so many museums to see and souvenirs to buy!