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Café Riche

I was at the Middle East Studies Association conference in DC last weekend (a huge 3-day event with hundreds of academics presenting papers on hundreds of topics). I didn’t attend that thoroughly–it was mostly a chance to see old friends in DC. One of the panels I did go to was on Café Riche. Half a dozen students at AUC’s Economic and Business History Research Center are working on a book on the famous Downtown Cairo landmark (its working title is “Café Riche: A Hundred Years of History,” and it will be published by AUC Press.)

The papers focused on the cafés social and intellectual history, with heavy emphasis on its importance to 1960s writers; they used oral histories and documents obtained from the owner. Unfortunately none of the papers really delves into the economics of Riche–the details of how it operates, and of the background and motivations of its grumpy current owner, Mr. Magdy. This is basically because the young researchers depended on Mr. Magdy for access.

The talk that followed the papers (with Roger Owen and Fawwaz Trabulsi intervening) was particularly interesting. The conclusion seemed to be that Café Riche has turned into an artificial museum of itself, a tourist attraction using its history as its capital (and a kind of obnoxiously elite social space at that–with an expensive menu designed to keep the “riff-raff” out and, apparently, an overtly anti-muhagaba policy. Yet clearly this landmark exerts a strong nostalgic pull, since even though everyone agrees it’s almost irrelevant to the capital’s current cultural life, it nonetheless ends up the center of a panel and a book. One of the remarks that I enjoyed was when one of the young presenters said that Café Riche has always been an imagined space, that the 1960s writers who made it famous were themselves weaving a myth of romantic freedom into the place–that it has in some sense never really “been” but has always been made up.

Meanwhile, what I’d like to know is: is it really open again?

Iraq documentary focused on female soldiers

I should have posted this on Veteran’s Day, this past week. It’s a review I recently wrote of a documentary about US service women in Iraq. The special team was called “Team Lioness” (they don’t seem to have had any inkling of the implications of “lioness” in Arabic) and used to interact with Iraqi civilians in situations in which women were needed. It’s a pretty good film, and one more reminder of how much Iraq (remember Iraq? Now that the election is over..) has cost. Although I think we need to always remember that it’s cost Iraqis way more than it’s cost our country.

Guilt by association

“The Review” Editor Jonathan Shainin has an excellent editorial parsing the last-minute attacks of the McCain campaign on Obama for his “troubling” association with Columbia Professor Rashid Khalidi. Shainin does a good job of calling out Obama for his equivocal stance in the face of these racist attacks: the way he deplored the attacks but didn’t do enough to challenge their underlying logic (practically any Arab = radical = terrorist).

Jewel of Medina

The Literary Saloon has a good post collecting reviews of “The Jewel of Medina,” the novel about the Prophet Mohammed’s young wife Aisha that made it into the news mostly thanks to the kind of idiotic reaction that one can unfortunately almost count on.

Unsurprisingly, most reviewers agree the book (which is described as a “bodice-ripper” and has a scene in which the protagonist’s marriage is consummated) is pretty mediocre. But it’s apparently the #1 selling book in Serbia (I’m still not sure why). Let’s just hope Egyptian clerics and tabloid editors don’t get ahold of this story, or we’ll have another Danish cartoons situation.

Elias Khoury at Words without Borders

Words Without Borders is featuring the new translation of Elias Khoury’s “Yalo” in its Book Club page. The section includes an introduction to the book, with a good analysis of Khoury’s style, and a discussion by translator Paul Theroux of the process of translating this work. There is also an open discussion forum, and more articles will be posted throughout the month.

Khoury is probably best known for his novel “Bab El-Shems” (The Gate of the Sun), a large, dense work based to a great extent on oral interviews Khoury conducted with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. I took a class with Khoury at NYU a few years back (he teaches there every Spring). Since he’s not only a major novelist but a major intellectual figure in Lebanon, it was a great way to learn about Lebanese literary and political history. I admire his work, although sometimes it strikes me as stylized and ideologically (for lack of a better word) driven. He’s definitely a post-modern writer; his work, which often involves repetitions and conflicting narratives, addresses the very problems of giving a coherent narrative of events. This strikes me as a theme that is particularly relevant to Lebanon, where it seems to me that arriving at a common, agreed-upon history has long been a challenge. I was also struck by what he told us of his writing process; he writes his stream-of-consciousness books in several drafts; he writes once, then starts over, without referring to the original, and re-writes the whole novel several times.

The Devastation of Iraq’s Past

“What is currently taking place in southern Iraq,” Gil Stein, the director of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, writes in the catalog to “Catastrophe!,” the institute’s disturbing new exhibition on the subject, “is nothing less than the eradication of the material record of the world’s first urban, literate civilization.”

The New York Review of Books has a long article on the looting and destruction of Iraq’s cultural heritage.

Sacred Objects

I quite liked this short essay by Sophia Al Maria in the last issue of Bidoun, about the proliferation of miraculous appearances of Allah’s name spelled in baby’s ears, fishes scales, etc. (sort of reminds me of the many appearances of Jesus in the vegetables and washing machines of suburban American moms, as reported by the News of the World). I haven’t gotten my hands on a hard copy of the magazine, and only a few essays are available online, but this issue–full of short essay about various “objects” in the Middle East–looks good.

AUC’s new campus: a mirage in the desert?

First off, apologies for the slow posting (traveling outside Egypt at the moment).

I meant to link to a story I did before I took off on AUC’s new campus. In September, the American University in Cairo is leaving its location on central Tahrir Square and moving to a brand new campus in the desert suburb of New Cairo. The AUC is quite an institution in Egyptian cultural and intellectual life, and in the life of Downtown Cairo. The move is a dramatic change for the university, which is basically suddenly going from being an urban to a suburban university. What I find particularly interesting about the move is how it fits into a broader pattern of (not to sound alarmist) the abandonment of Downtown in favour of sprawling desert suburbs. Living in Cairo, it’s impossible not to understand the desire to move to less congested, less polluted areas. But personally I fear that this move (of the elites) to the edges of the city is yet another sign of the total lack of foresight and vision that is so endemic to the administration and planning of Cairo. And the role of real estate speculation–the fact that the construction of new suburbs is much more profitable than the upkeep of central neighborhoods–can’t be underestimated. Anyway, here’s what I wrote:

Last month, students and faculty at the American University in Cairo bade farewell not only to each other but to their campus. Over the summer, the university is abandoning its historical downtown location and moving to a new campus on the outskirts of the city.

The offices of professors and administrators are cluttered with packed boxes. The library shelves are empty. And workers are toiling day and night in the desert outside Cairo to have the new campus – which will be 29 times bigger than the old one – ready by the time classes start in September.

“It’s a very rare opportunity for a university to rebuild itself and upgrade to extraordinary levels all at one time,” says Phil Donoghue, vice president for planning and administration, of the move to the new state-of-the-art campus. But others are concerned that by leaving Cairo’s downtown and moving to the suburbs, the university will lose an important connection to the city and a cornerstone of its identity.

You can read the rest of the piece here.

Those girls of Riyadh!

A few weeks ago Gamal Al Ghitany (the novelist and editor of Akhbar Al Adab) wrote a column about Arabic best-sellers. He was talking about a general trend, but he focused on the novel “Banaat Riyadh” (“Girls of Riyadh”) which has been a best-seller in the Arab world and has recently come out in English. Al Ghitany talks about how Arabic literature, after 9/11, has become of interest to the West, and how Arab writers have (consciously or unconsciously) met a prospective Western audience’s particular demands. “What is required?” he writes. “What’s required is a peek into this society which seems closed to Westerners, and in which women occupy a particular place…” Al Ghitany describes “Banaat Riyadh” as “a modest, ordinary work from an artistic point of view” but he says, according to the “new literary standards” it’s a “treasure trove, starting with the title.” Al Ghitany wouldn’t mind the work’s commercial success if it weren’t taken for a direct indication of its literary value so that, he writes, a British newspaper mentioned the work among a list of “six essential works to understanding Arabic literature.”

While I share Al Ghitany’s frustration with voyeurism and sensationalism, and with the generally quite superficial and misinformed Western coverage of Arab culture, I’ve actually heard some pretty good things about “Banaat Riyadh.” No one says it’s a masterpiece, but three women friends whose taste in books I trust have told me they greatly enjoyed it. I haven’t read it yet (it’s part of a big pile of books on my shelf that I often eye with guilt) but based on what I’ve read about it, it sounds like the author exploits the desire to see into the life of women in Saudi Arabia in conscious, funny and perhaps subversive ways. And she seems to use different dialects, registers, and languages to great effect.

Anyway, this column reminded me of the controversy that has surrounded Marilyn Booth’s translation of “Banaat Riyadh” into English. Booth has written at length about the ways the author and publisher changed her translation without consulting her. She gives many examples in this article in Translation Studies (unfortunately not free to the public) of the kinds of changes that were made. I have to say that based on the examples she gives it certainly looks as if the changes flattened the narrative voice she’d created into something more formal and less charming.

Continue reading Those girls of Riyadh!

Thoughts on “Taxi”

Khaled Al Khamissi’s book “Taxi” came out in English a few months ago (the Arabic original has been very successful since it was published in 2006). I really enjoyed this book. I read it in Morocco last summer and it made me homesick for Cairo and its rickety taxis–maybe not the long sweaty rides in bumper-to-bumper traffic, but certainly the surprising and amusing conversations you sometime have. Below is a review I wrote.

There are an estimated 80,000 taxis circling the streets of Cairo today. That means about one in every 200 residents of the Egyptian capital sits behind the wheel of a cab. And the proportion of the population that finds itself regularly in the passenger seat may be much higher. That taking a taxi has become an essential ritual of life in Cairo—that taxis are one of the spaces in which Cairenes most commonly meet—is an intuition fundamental to Khaled Al Khamissi’s “Taxi.” Continue reading Thoughts on “Taxi”