The Literary Life of Cairo

Samia Mehrez

Description

Readings from literary works that re-construct a century of Cairo's changing social life.
Readings from literary works that re-construct a century of Cairo's changing social life.
Unlike The Literary Atlas of Cairo, which focuses on the literary geopolitics of the cityscape, this companion volume immerses the reader in the complex network of socioeconomic and cultural lives in the city. The seven chapters first introduce the reader to representations of some of Cairo's prominent profiles, both political and cultural, and their impact on the city's literary geography, before presenting a spectrum of readings of the city by its multiethnic, multinational, and multilingual writers across class, gender, and generation. Daunting images of colonial school experiences and startling contrasts of postcolonial educational realities are revealed, while Cairo's moments of political participation and oppression are illustrated, as well as the space accorded to women within the city across history and class. The city's marginals are placed on its literary map, alongside representations of the relationship between writing and drugs, and the places, paraphernalia, and products of the drug world across class and time.
Together, The Literary Atlas of Cairo and The Literary Life of Cairo produce a literary geography of Cairo that goes beyond the representation of space in literature to reconstruct the complex network of human relationships in that space.

Sujets

• Anthologies
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617971709
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in 2011 by
The American University in Cairo Press
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
www.aucpress.com
Copyright © 2011 by Samia Mehrez
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Dar el Kutub No. 2266/10
ISBN 978 977 416 390 6
Dar el Kutub Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mehrez, Samia
The Literary Life of Cairo: One Hundred Years in the Heart of the City / by Samia Mehrez.—Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2011
p; cm.
eISBN: 978 161 797 170 9
1. Arabic Literature—History and Criticism. I. Title
892.709
1 2 3 4 5 6 15 14 13 12 11
Designed by Fatiha Bouzidi
Printed in Egypt
For Cairo and her authors
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Cairo, Mother of Cities, Again and Again
Icons of the City
Robert Solé, Birds of Passage
Ahmad Hussein, And Cairo Burned
Nawal El Saadawi, Walking through Fire
Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun
Mohamed Mansi Qandil, Broken Soul
Edward Said, Homage to a Belly Dancer
Mahmoud Al-Wardani, Heads Ripe for Plucking
Mohamed Mansi Qandil, Broken Soul
Naguib Mahfouz, The Day the Leader was Killed
Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love
Ibrahim Issa, The Assassination of the Big Man
Cairo Cosmopolitan
Ihsan Abdel Quddus, I am Free
Fathy Ghanem, A Girl from Shubra
Midhat Gazalé, Pyramids Road
Chafika Hamamsy, Zamalek
Colette Rossant, Apricots on the Nile
Robert Solé, Birds of Passage
Alaa Al Aswany, Mme Zitta Mendès, A Last Image
Samia Serageldin, The Cairo House
Mohamed Berrada, Like a Summer Never to Be Repeated
Ghazi Abdel Rahman al-Qusaybi, The Apartment of Freedom
Mahmoud Al-Wardani, Heads Ripe for Plucking
Bahaa Abdelmegid, Saint Theresa
Yasser Abdel Latif, The Law of Inheritance
Alaa Al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building
Hamdi Abu Golayyel, Thieves in Retirement
Going to School in Cairo
Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk
Hassan Hassan, In the House of Muhammad Ali
Taha Hussein, The Days
Ihab Hassan, Out of Egypt
Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage
Midhat Gazalé, Pyramids Road
Laila Osayran, Colored Ribbons from My Life
Edward Said, Out of Place
Ihsan Abdel Quddus, I am Free
Mohamed Berrada, Like a Summer Never to Be Repeated
Miral al-Tahawy, The Blue Aubergine
Khaled Al Khamissi, Taxi
The Street Is Ours?
Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk
Huda Shaarawi, Harem Years
Latifa al-Zayyat, The Open Door
Ahmad Hussein, And Cairo Burned
Idris Ali, Poor
Robert Solé, Birds of Passage
Ghaleb Halasa, The Novelists
Latifa al-Zayyat, The Search: Personal Papers
Hala El Badry, A Certain Woman
Mahmoud Al-Wardani, Heads Ripe for Plucking
Radwa Ashour, Warm Rock
Ibrahim Asian, The Heron
Salwa Bakr, Zeenat Marches in the President’s Funeral
Mona Prince, Three Suitcases for Departure
Alaa Al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building
Alaa Al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building
Mourid Barghouti, Checkpoints
Khaled Al Khamissi, Taxi
Sharif Hatatah, The Eye with an Iron Lid
Raouf Musad, The Ostrich Egg
Sonallah Ibrahim, The Smell of It
Nawal El Saadawi, Memoirs from the Women’s Prison
Hamdi el-Gazzar, Secret Pleasures
Women in the City
Tawfiq al-Hakim, The Return of the Spirit
Naguib Mahfouz, Midaq Alley
Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk
Fathy Ghanem, The Man Who Lost His Shadow
Yusuf Idris, The Siren
Mohamed Berrada, Like a Summer Never to Be Repeated
Sonallah Ibrahim, Zaat
Mohamed Salah al-Azab, Frequent Stops
Ahdaf Soueif, In the Eye of the Sun
Salwa Bakr, The Golden Chariot
Khaled Al Khamissi, Taxi
Amira Abou-Taleb, Barbed Silk
Ghada Abdel Al, I Want to Get Married
Cairo’s Underworld
Naguib Mahfouz, Midaq Alley
Maguid Tobia, Five Unread Papers
Yahya Taher Abdullah, The Story of the Upper Egyptian
Hamdi Abu Golayyel, A Dog with No Tail
Salwa Bakr, Zeenat Marches in the President’s Funeral
Mekkawi Said, Cairo Swan Song
Hamid Abdel Samad, Farewell, Heaven
Idris Ali, Poor
Mohamed al-Fakharani, An Interval for Bewilderment
Hani Abdel Mourid, Kyrie Eleison
Cairo’s Drug Culture
Naguib Mahfouz, Adrift on the Nile
Yusuf Idris, Did You Have to Turn on the Light, Lili?
Ismail Wali al-Din, Saqqara Grief
Albert Cossery, Proud Beggars
Gamil Atia Ibrahim, Down to the Sea
Khairy Shalaby, The Hashish Waiter
Yasser Abdel Hafez, In Celebration of Life
Hamdi Abu Golayyel, A Dog with No Tail
Raouf Musad, Ithaka
Yahya Taher Abdullah, A Tale with a Moral
Bahaa Abdelmegid, Sleeping with Strangers
Mohamed al-Fakharani, An Interval for Bewilderment
Essam Youssef, A ¼ Gram
Epilogue
Sherine Aboul Naga, Cairo Treason
Sonallah Ibrahim, Cairo From Edge to Edge
About the Authors
Bibliography
Glossary
Index of Authors
Acknowledgments
When I first started the research on this project, I never imagined that I would find such a staggering amount of literary material on Cairo, whose sheer size and scope, even after considerable editing, still ultimately dictated the decision to publish two volumes instead of one: The Literary Atlas of Cairo and The Literary Life of Cairo . I am therefore first and foremost utterly grateful to Cairo’s authors, who, in this context, are the authors of Cairo , the city that readers will encounter and experience through this collective atlas . Without these authors’ inspiring works and their willingness to be part of this literary map, the literary atlas project, now in two volumes, would simply not have existed.
In order to complete this project within a year as I had envisioned, I requested and was granted leave without pay from the American University in Cairo (AUC). I have been supported throughout the year by several grants that allowed me to dedicate all my time to researching, compiling, translating, editing, and producing this work. I am indebted to the Ford Foundation Egypt and the Netherlands Cultural Fund in Egypt for their instant interest in and support of The Literary Atlas of Cairo proposal. I am equally grateful to the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture for their generous funding of this project. Mark Linz, director of the AUC Press and Ibrahim El Moallem, president of Dar El Shorouk, both made an immediate commitment to support and publish this work based on my initial proposal. I wish to thank them both for their insight and confidence and sincerely hope that the end product lives up to their expectations. Kamal Abou Deeb’s and Barbara Harlow’s enthusiastic letters of support for the atlas project are most certainly behind the generous support I have received. The introductory material to The Literary Life of Cairo was written at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy, where I was a resident scholar in August 2010. I wish to thank Professor Pilar Palacia, director of the Rockefeller Bellagio Center, and the entire staff at the villa, for having made my stay so heavenly. Special thanks also to my resident colleagues and their spouses at the center who made my residency a most memorable and fun one, and whose interest in and comments on my presentation of the atlas project spurred me on to finish my task.
My concentrated and rather lonely year of work on this atlas could only have been sustained through endless conversations with friends and colleagues, who listened tirelessly over and over again to how the manuscript was coming along: its structure, its contents, its stories, and its problems. I want to thank Huda Lutfi, Joseph Massad, Nashwa Azhari, Mona Prince, Randa Shaath, Sherif Boraie, Iman Ghazallah, Ragui Assaad, Heba El-Kholy, Mona Abaza, Kamal Fahmy, and Neil Hewison for their kind willingness to read, comment on, and provide suggestions of new texts to be included in the Atlas . Their enthusiasm and encouragement have meant the world to me as I raced through to finish what an internal university grant committee had evaluated as an impossible task to complete within the proposed timeframe. I also wish to thank AUC students Andrew Heiss, Alex Ortiz, and Sarah Hawas, who enthusiastically agreed to translate some excerpts in the literary atlas project, two of which are included in this volume. I want to seize this opportunity to correct an oversight in The Literary Atlas of Cairo , the first volume in this project, where the translation of the excerpt from Mohamed Salah al-Azab’s Repeated Stops should have been under the name of Alex Ortiz rather than my name.
Artist and photographer, Amr Khadr has been my main interlocutor with regard to the details of the atlas project. He is also my partner in the Literary Cairo Installation , a multi-media exhibition that will be based primarily on the literary material amassed in this Atlas . Amr’s unique visual work on Cairo and his profound interest in literary representations of the city have allowed us to map out a new project that would integrate the literary and the visual in what we think may be an unprecedented endeavor. I am grateful to him for sh