'Round the decay of that colossal wreck. Cairo--16 Aug. 2007



A Turkish Girl


Note: The Zabbaleen are Cairo’s garbage collectors

Shelley provides the best titles for any writing on Egypt.

On my second day in Cairo I moved into the only apartment I had been able to find available on short notice for a short-term lease. My roomates were a struggling Egyptian young professional and a German student who was never there. It was musty-smelling, dusty, dark, and saunalike, on this record-hot Cairo summer. I was the third to move in so my room was, predictably, the worst. It had some government-auction metal shelves in one corner, three broken bedframes in another, a thin, stained mattress on the floor and—my only real need—a desk.

For light it had a single incandescent bulb wired up to an electrical cord that used to power a fluorescent light in the ceiling. The fluorescent lighting had, for some reason Mohammed tried to explain but I did not grasp, been disconnected to permit the jerry-rigging of the light bulb by the previous occupant. The bulb was strung up on its cord to a small nail pounded into the wall, and dangled above the desk, giving off about the light of an oil-lamp, and about the same heat too. Given, however, the worn wooden desk and the gray, dust-covered and above all empty-of-books metal shelves, the place already looked enough like one of the dreaded offices of the Egyptian bureaucracy that I was glad not to have a fluorescent light twitching overhead. God a I hate government and fear the police, most of all when I have done nothing wrong.

The place, as I saw it, had two principal advantages. The first was that it was cheap enough—about 100 Canadian Dollars a month—that if something else came up I could pay my two months rent and leave without a second thought. You get, as they say, what you pay for. The second was that in the tradition of the anthropologist researchers I admired and sought to emulate on this trip, it would be a trial to live in.

I had just come from Turkey, where I adjudicated at the European Universities Debating Championships. The Turks were trying so hard to impress their western European guests that they failed to show us anything of real Turkey, opting instead for a sanitized, safe, and extraordinarily boring gated-compound-type experience in the seclusion of their finest--and blandest--university. We were bussed from spleandour to spleandour of a world gone by. Where was Istanbul of today in all this?


Two Turkish Girls

The first time they released us from this confinement I fled the group to an orange juice stand and immediately ordered a fresh pressed juice, with ice—as you are told by travel doctors, who have never left their office, never to do. A girl I had met at the tournament and would make love to later that night motioned to me ‘what are you doing? We’re leaving’ and I waved her on, as in ‘go, go’ and answered the question to myself by thinking: ‘I am making myself sick.’ ‘I am making myself sick,’ I thought. This is what I do in foreign countries—I make myself sick. I eat all the food, drink all the water, try everything until, inevitably, I fall ill. I have never totally understood this—is it to purge my system of the world I know? To break myself down, suffer, destroy my sense of ease and comfort, so that I can know that life is not so easy—and then build myself back up again?

When I emerged from the orange juice shop I had lost the group, as one does immediately in cities, especially Muslim ones. In a single door, down and single alley, up a single staircase, and a group of 20 people are gone forever from sight. I felt a flutter in of excitement my stomach at being alone, finally. I also felt an unease at having lost so rapidly the protective bubble that had surrounded me for 4 or 5 days. I never feel such apprehension at being alone, for it is my normal way of being, and it thrust upon me the realization of just how totally pampered I had been, how much being taken care of had penetrated even me, who is so guarded against it. Imagine those who make a life of being waited on—how quickly they can be thrust down in the gutter, and how ill at ease they are with themselves, in the world.

Pondering my new apartment, in the spirit of making myself sick, I cherished in a bizarre way the thought of labouring away at night by the dim light in this unbearable apartment, sweat flowing down my sides and my back from my armpits and shoulder blades, and running in my scalp, as I laboured each night to keep my fieldnotes. I needed somehow to suffer here in Egypt if I were to get anything from it of value.

And to think that this apartment is of a luxury that the Zabbaleen could never afford! And that when I am sick I can see the doctor, and take medicines, and be cured! What a mockery, my meagre authenticity.

Mohammed, pleasedly, invited me to open the tall shutters out on to ‘my balcony.’ My own balcony! Once encased in the sort of opaque glass used for bathroom windows—what purpose a greenhouse-balcony of that kind might serve totally escaped me—the balcony now had the benefit of a view and some ventilation, since a number of the panes had been put out over the years and never replaced. Looking down into the alley behind, I had a view of a typical Cairo rooftop scene of garbage thrown from windows, unfinished construction, ventilation outlets and the like, all covered with a layer of dust as thick as that on the moon, but a dirty and sooty grey-brown, like what you get when you clean the air filter of a diesel generator. ‘This is nice,’ I said, smiling, and pointing to a tiny patch of garden visible out of the corner of the eye to the left of the balcony.

My first night in the apartment I took out my desk onto the balcony, which it almost entirely occupied, and read a few pages from Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. I was in need of some inspiration for my fieldwork, and thought I might find it here. It was not that I was unenthusiastic about my work—on the contrary, I had an entrepreneurial energy and degree of organization, thrust and momentum I rarely feel. It wasn’t discipline imposed, but rather a genuine desire and need to accomplish things—to just get them done—that came from having ownership over and interest in my project, as I did in my writing about Lebanon, when I would stay up all night, or my work in Malaysia, when I would stay up all night. It's all about what keeps you up at night.

In fact, this reading was procrastination, since I was in desperate need of reading specifically about the Zabbaleen to prepare for my interviews. Yet I wanted the connection to this young anthropologist, a student of Geertz, as I so wanted to be, who was setting out for the first time to do fieldwork in the Middle East. And I wished at this time, I must say, that my fieldwork were for six or twelve or eighteen months, and I thought a lot about writing to the University immediately to tell them that I wanted to be accepted directly into the D.Phil or to hell with them and I would just stay on my own and make a book of it.
Rabinow spoke in his 2006 introduction to the thirty year-old work, of one of my favourite topics—the imaginary other and uncontacted peoples of the Amazon—calling Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques the ‘great masterpiece of what Susan Sontag calls “the antropologist as hero” setting out to witness the supposed “world one the wane”.’ To witness the world on the wane was also what I sought.

Long before I knew of Levi-Strauss--except his quotation that perhaps we travel to explore the deserts in ourselves rather than those that surround us--and in much less beautiful and less wholly theorized a manner, I too had seen the world on the wane—my triste arctique, or triste nord—and wished somehow to see it, just see it, before it was all gone. Indeed to not share it was a specific condition of my effort, for I could not bear contributing to its downfall, even if that were inevitable with or without my contribution. Like Zhivago in Barikinow, when asked what I would do, I would reply ‘just live’—and hope that meant I would at least not harm others, as so few in this world succeed in; the modest first duty imposed by Hypocrates, do no harm, is harder to respect and more often violated than almost anyone realizes.

Jealousy raged inside me when I read Hugh Brody’s accounts of the 1970s arctic, and Dawn Chatty’s Oman of the 1980s. Why was all the world gone up in smoke? Why was I born when no Tibet lay yet unvisited? Like Richard in Rabinow's reflections, generationally, I was a failure: born too late. As little as just one generation too late. I hated them for having been the last to see these things, having in some way taken them from me. And I hated the world too, that inexorable, advancing juggernaut of ‘progress,’ or in my mind, merely change, for things seemed as likely to me to be regressing, digressing, or devolving—whichever term you prefer—as progressing.

Yet at some point—again with an intuition far exceeding the grasp of conscious mind—I felt that this had been done, that I was on a path by now so well trodden as to have become cliché, which has always been the inner sanctum, so to speak, in my personal hierarchy of hells. To live with the Inuit, the Bedouin—it seems almost laughable now. Are their worlds not by now gone and gone? I think what drove this home was when Chatty mentioned to me in October how Hugh Brody had turned in his later years to the Bushmen of the Kalahari. ‘The Bushmen?’ I sneered. Those quintessentially stone-age people, those caricatures of the displaced, ill-treated, paleolithic remnants of human existence as it once was? It was just too predictable, and too overdone. Although I suppose I did take from it, as I did from Fergusson’s work in Zambia, reassurance that just because something has been done and done doesn’t mean that you cannot achieve prominence by redoing it—as long as you are novel in your approach.

I needed something else for my critique of civilization. I explained once to Kate Harris (who is mad about science and space) that while she was interested in pushing forward the scope of human experience by existing on its leading edge, I was interested in what was left behind and extinguished on its trailing end, as the world moved on, leaving behind peoples and ways of life. That she was interested in what we gained through progress, and I in what we lost. 'For something to be born, something has to die.' I suppose that is still true, but I do not know what besides nostalgia can thus be produced, or why I assumed that there were not equally saddening refutations of this advance to be found on the leading edge.

And so I came somehow to intuit that if I was to write against cities, against civilization, against progress, against industry, mechanization, urbanization, too many people, too much noise and all the shit that human beings produce every day we are alive, by our great ingenuity and indefeasible science, that there were not just one, but two ways to do it. I had so far been thinking about critiquing it by writing about what it was not. I had long before envisaged an aesthetic refutation of progress by demonstrating the beauty of a world devoid of it. I had wanted to attempt to write about the beauty of different life. The failed poet turned academic, seeking to convey a deeper truth through beauty. The secular Buddhist turned academic, seeking to avoid harming any living thing by journeying in the mind only, where your may walk a thousand miles without crushing even a blade of grass. But this is for real poets, real buddhists, of which I am neither.

As Rabinow put it ‘the world of the Other was an imaginary site—hence Rousseau—in which the alienation of modern man was unknown’ (xiii) and in a footnote explaining the reference to Rousseau, ‘Rousseau was clear, in his famous description of “the state of nature,” that this was a critique of civilization.’ This was correct and has mostly so far—from Rousseau to Edward Abbey—been the approach to the critique of civilization: l’éloge de la nature. As though the alienation of modern life were plain enough for all to see, at least when an unalienated life with which to contrast it is sketched.

But why critique civilization by writing about what it is not? Why not critique it by writing about what it is? That, I understood as I read Rabinow, is what I sought to do in Cairo—a place I would not want to live in—amongst the Zabbaleen—a people who live in a way I would not want to live. Theirs is a rare glimpse of an extreme expression of urban modernity. They are a purely urban, purely modern caste of fallen, untouchable people whose life evidences a topsy-turvy, Kafkaesque existence where nothing—not even garbage—is free, and human dignity reaches a sad and darkly comedic nadir as people are forced to survive by stealing spoiled, stinking and broken stuff that others pay to get out of their lives.

To hell with the unspoilt, if it still exists, which I greatly doubt. I am not concerned, at least for now, with describing how beautiful and simple I think life can be. I am concerned with showing how complicated, unjust, and ugly it can be. The fact that it is impossible to decide whether the development projects improve or destroy the lives of the Zabbaleen is not due to our failure to understand them. It is systemic, it is inherent, it is embedded. The uncertainty of this post-modern garbage-world is the moral and ethical equivalent of the quantum uncertainty that beset physics some decades ago--with similar philosophic implications. There is something inherent to this universe that makes it impossible to do good in this situation, and that is a key to opening very deep vaults containing very ancient secrets.


A Turkish Boy

I met with Karin Grimlund, who was working on the Zabbaleen, and she conveyed an experience both unsettled and unsettling. Unsettled because the tension remained unresolved, and she had not yet crystallized her experience into what she hoped to write about. Unsettling because nothing in the Zabbaleen’s story was as it seemed, and nothing was as it should be. Consider the squalor in which the Zabbaleen live. They are affected by blood bourne disease, high infant mortality; many children work sorting garbage rather than attending school. The men labour like a beast of burden, like the Volga boatmen, in 40° C heat. Is this a lifestyle worth preserving? Are the Copts—a disadvantaged religious minority in Egypt—not forced into this marginal livelihood in the first place, and if so, why should they or others defend it? Would it not be an improvement to the human condition—a worthwhile ‘development’ project—to mechanize and modernize the garbage collection process and force the Zabbalin into other livelihoods?

Yet, they have resisted these projects. When they leave their community, they express the desire to return to it, and show a certain happiness there, Karin told me. Their idendity, and dignity—what little of it they have—are tied up in this lifestyle. They are better recyclers than the best of the mechanized world, and as such stand as a triumph of the low-tech over the engineering-obsessed culture of the west.

This moral ambiguity is irresolvable, I believe, as it is inherent in the urban slum-world and general post-modernity the Zabbaleen epitomize.

There is something about the image of human beings living amongst moutains of garbage, living from that garbage—the rubble of a crumbling, once great but now fallen civilization: Egypt—with a backdrop of rising smoke, surrounded by feral swine, that gives a glimpse of the future. It is post-apocalyptic avant la lettre, a glimpse of what is to come.

Thus, with the same goal as Edward Abbey, as Rousseau, as others, but with opposite methods, I would write about civilization as a way of writing against civilization. By embedding myself in civilization’s deepest, most degenerate core, and projecting forward, rather than withdrawing to civilization’s outer, untouched edge and projecting backward in time.

It is a baroque (a mishappen pearl) or perhaps the baroque (a complex, ornate and ugly extreme form of a thing) that I’m looking for, and, in the Zabbaleen, may have found