“I knew it in my heart,” she mumbled as her tears fell profusely. She felt her heart shudder as though it was as heavy as a stone. “How could you have allowed them to kill you, Shuhdi? Why did you let them kill you, love. My God! They're a pack of dogs. Murderers, yes, murderers.” The speaker, Roxanne, was a Greek born in Egypt. The place is outside Abu Zaabal Prison. Shuhdi was her husband Shuhdi Atiya el-Shafie. The passage from In Heads Ripe for Plucking by Mahmoud el-Wardani (AUC Press, 2008) appears in one of several extracts from this book published in The Literary Life of Cairo compiled by Samia Mehrez (AUC Press, 2011). It was intended to be part of her acclaimed The Literary Atlas of Cairo (AUC Press, 2010), as she explains in her introduction. However, she had compiled so much material that eventually it was published in these two volumes, comprising “two fairly independent yet complementary literary maps of the city”, which she refers to as the literary atlas project. The present book represents Cairenes' lives and human relations across the city's literary topography over the last century. It is divided into seven sections including ‘Cairo Cosmopolitan', ‘Going to School in Cairo',' Women in the City', ‘Cairo's Underworld' and ‘Drug Culture' and contains summary biographies of the 48 authors of the 72 books, from which she has selected extracts. Mehrez, who is a professor of Arabic literature in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilisation and director of the Centre for Translation Studies at the American University in Cairo, suffered her own displacement, when her literary atlas project coincided with “the relocation of the American University in Cairo campus from Cairo's throbbing downtown Al Tahrir area to its present location in New Cairo. “This imminent displacement from the city of my childhood, school years, social life, and professional growth – not to mention emotional attachments and a lifetime of memories – all brought forth a sudden desire to try to capture this ever expanding space at once before I was uprooted from it, so to speak.” In her introduction to the ‘Icons of the City' section of The Literary Life of Cairo Professor Mehrez writes, “Just as authors have represented public iconic figures though their literary works, they have also invented new ones, perhaps little-known, and have bestowed upon them the status of city icons by writing them into their literature. One such example… is Shuhdi Atiya el-Shafie, a leading figure in the Egyptian communist movement during the 1940s and 1950s who died of torture in Abou Zaabal Prison on June 15, 1960 at the hands of the Nasser regime, which he supported until the very last minute.” Fifty years later in Alexandria on June 11, 2010, Khaled Saeed was beaten to death by two undercover policemen. In her prescient conclusion to the introduction to ‘The Street is Ours?' section, Samia Mehrez states: “What is horrifyingly new in the state's human rights violation is that they are now committed in public, shamelessly, deliberately, for everyone to witness and be warned.” She refers to Khaled Saeed's death as the “most shocking instance of such public state brutality…” which “mobilised thousands of Egyptians all over the country, who took to the streets to denounce State violence and declare him the first martyr of the renewed Emergency Law.” In the month that this book was published, there were to be hundreds more martyrs in Egypt in the January 25 revolution sparked in part by the Internet Khaled Saeed campaign. Given the crucial role of social networking and other websites in the revolution, if Mehrez were to continue her literary atlas project, it is tempting to speculate if she would also draw on virtual sources in a subsequent volume. Many authors in the present book have been translated from Arabic and published in English and several extracts have been translated from Arabic by the compiler, bringing them within reach of readers, who do not read Arabic. Other author have written in English or been translated from French. Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature Naguib Mahfouz is substantially represented by excerpts from four of his works in six of the sections. The most recent publication is Essam Youssef's first novel A Gram (Cairo: Montana Productions, 2010) on Cairo's contemporary drug scene and users. Cairo's modern social, political and cultural history and its diversity are reflected in Samia Mehrez's keen-eyed compilation of the components of its literary geography. For instance, she has alighted on an excerpt from Reflections in Exile (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001) of the late celebrated Palestinian intellectual Edward Saeed, which should be required reading for all today's aspirant and actual belly-dancers and is included in the ‘Icons of the City' section. He is paying homage to “a remarkable symbol of national culture”, Tahia Carioca, who was, in his opinion, “the finest belly-dancer ever” and exemplified “the essence of the classic Arab belly-dancer's art … not how much but how little the artist moves ....” Saeed had watched her through at least 25 or 30 of her films, but, as a 14-year-old schoolboy in 1950, he saw her once only in a full-scale cabaret performance, which “I shall remember forever with startling vividness”. Writing 50 years later, he recalls and describes every detail of the evening and the performance. “[Tahia's] grace and elegance suggested something altogether classical and even monumental. The paradox was that she was so immediately sensual and yet so remote, so unapproachable, unobtainable.” In discussing her numerous films, he also pays tribute to her wit, intelligence and beauty. In introducing the ‘Cairo Cosmopolitan' section, Samia Mehrez states: “Cairo's cosmopolitan legacy has forever been overshadowed by Alexandria and its constructed and of late, contested cosmopolitan history. However, the fact remains that Cairo, like Alexandria, has attracted multiple ethno-religious communities and can boast an exceptionally rich literary output in several languages by members of these communities who have historicised the tangled textures of multi-cultural lives and experiences in the city.” Colette Rossant, French and Egyptian, Jewish and Catholic, later married to an American, integrates relevant recipes into her memoir Apricots on the Nile (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004). The excerpt from her book describes the preparations for her grandmother's poker or canasta day and ensuing turmoil in which the dishes for her card-playing guests were made, including stuffed vine leaves and apricot pudding. The longest section of the book is ‘The Street is Ours', which ‘brings together a rich selection of representations of Cairenes' moments of uprising, demonstrations, resistance, and protest on the streets of the city. These are juxtaposed against equally detailed representations of consecutive regimes' repression and violence against Cairenes' lives and freedoms for over more than a century. The tension between public protest and State brutality throughout the twentieth century and beyond is perhaps the explanation for the rhetorical question that makes up the title of this section. The first extract is taken from Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk (AUC Press, 1989) concerning England's self-proclamation of Egypt as a protectorate and an address given in response by the nationalist leader of the Wafd Party Saad Zaghloul, provoking a heated family conversation. It is followed by pioneer Egyptian feminist leader and nationalist Huda Shaarawi's account of the first demonstration by women on March 16, 1919 “to protest the repressive acts and intimidation practiced by the British authority” (Harem Years, AUC Press 1986). The section ends with a shocking Internet scene of a young woman being mercilessly tortured by a sadistic and sexually aroused police officer. The video, which has been posted on a blog, makes the protagonist, who has been searching for this police officer, physically and violently ill. The passage is taken from Ladhdhat sirriya (Secret Pleasures) by Hamdi el-Gazzar (Cairo: Al-Dar Publishing, 2008). A brief epilogue closes The Literary Life of Cairo and its final and fitting words are taken from documentary novelist Son'allah Ibrahim's essay Cairo from Edge to Edge and translated by Samia Mehrez. “More than once I deserted my home city where I experienced the long and short ends of freedom. More than once I left it, embittered, enraged, determined never to see it again. More than once I abandoned it, haunted by its Citadel with its minarets, only to return again, meek and humble. To this very day I cannot explain my inability to live in any other city on the face of the earth.”
The Literary Life of Cairo, One Hundred Years in the Heart of the City, Edited and introduced by Samia Mehrez, The American University in Cairo (AUC) Press, 2011 Hardback, 433 pages, LE180
