©2011, UrbisMedia
These are sort of random thoughts and memoir snippets from various trips to Egypt, recalled and composed as I watch what appears to be a revolution in progress.
One of the lasting impressions I took away from my few visits to Egypt was that the Egyptians I met were quick to smile and had a sense of humor, certainly more so than other Middle Eastern peoples other than Iranians. That’s my impression; I am no expert on the subject. They seemed to me rather content. Obviously I misread that. They are not smiling now. I can’t be easy living on a couple bucks a day, with no health care, and under the thumb of a corrupt despot.
Tahrir Square in Cairo, where the demonstrations are centered, is not very square. I stayed close enough to it to have my sleep disturbed at the Nile Hilton by the ceaseless traffic (except for the present). I found it almost impossible to cross the “square” because I didn’t know the “rules” (like eye contact with the driver). Finally a local guy offered to guide me across only to end up on the other side conveniently right in front of his perfume store (“with surely some scents to suit the beautiful ladies in your life, sir”). You expect this sort of bullshit in a country where a lot of people make their well-being, such as it is, in small businesses. I deflected: “Sadly, sir, I am mortally allergic to perfumes. It would be a great risk to my health even enter your shop,” I lied, and I was off to the next (round) square and the famous Groppi café, where German and English spies kept an eye on one another while drinking tea and coffee.
Yes, I lied, and it wasn’t the only time when I was in Egypt. The country seems to bring out the prevarication in me. It’s like a little game: if they lie to you, you have to lie back, or you get conned. It’s sort of a good-natured lying. If not, I would have a whole lot of souvenir crap that I don’t need. “Sir, come in. Just look. Everything made by my hand.” Or, “Sir, could you read letter for me from my English girlfriend?” No kidding, I got hit with this with this one several times. Once I even helped fill out a guy’s visa application to visit his girl in America. I must look like a romantic mark. There is always tea to obligate you a little more to buy something. After a while you get creative at deceits. One guy kept pestering me to get up and take a ride on his camel at Giza, for a price, of course. “But sir,” I told him bald-faced, “my religion forbids me to ride any animal larger than myself.” His religion wouldn’t let him counter that? Although he did mumble some imprecation in Arabic.
I found the Egyptians to smile a lot and to be good-natured about all the verbal jousting. Although there is nothing jocular about Mubarak. He actually tried to get away with in his speech that he was concerned about the safety of the protesters and then unleash gangs of thugs to dent their heads. “See, I warned you it was dangerous out there.”
Aside from my tendency to refer to Mubarak as “Hose-job” (I think that people used to refer to 18th Dynsasty Pharoah Horemheb also as “Hose-job”) the closest I ever got to personally experiencing the thugishness of Hose-job was when his customs police grabbed one of the tourists I was leading. They took the guy into a back room for a few hours while we had no idea why or what they were doing to him. He was a second grade teacher from Petaluma who had a name they thought sounded like a terrorist they were after. Complete bullshit, of course; I was probably supposed to cough up some Egyptian pounds or some US green to spring him, but then I thought they might use that to haul my cute butt (well it was cute back then) into some back room on a bribery charge. They finally released him and I chewed out my Egyptian tour managers for mishandling the matter. My tourist, Josh, was really shaken when we got him back. I interrogated Anwar, one of the mangers. [This part is taken from my book, The Stranger is Me; you can find it on Amazon.com]:
“The authorities suspected that Mr. Joosh. . . ,” Anwar explained. “Something in the computer.”:
“Mr. Josh,” I corrected.
“That Mr. Jawsh is a terrorist.”
“What! A terrorist!? I yelped, a little too loudly. “The guy’s a fourth grade teacher from Petaluma who’s afraid of parking meters. A terrorist!?”
“Really, did they show you this information?” I asked.
“Yes, from the computer,” Anwar replied. He didn’t seem to think this was such a great coincidence. “But they have no photo of this terrorist, so they had to contact other authorities for more information. That is why Mr. Joosh had to wait a long time.”
“Yeah, so long he had to piss in his pants,” I shot back. I had noticed Josh’s pants when we were handing out room keys in spite of his keeping his carry-on in front of his crotch.
“He is OK now, they think he is not a terrorist” Anwar put in.
“No, he’s a basket case. That guy couldn’t blow up a balloon, much less an embassy,” I fired back.
I left it there, figuring pushing the matter any further might bring me to the attention of Mr. Hose-job. Josh was reclusive and not forthcoming when people asked him abut his experience.
Here’s another example of Egyptian humor. This time I was working on a script that required I learn about some hybrid goats that were being bred in a town in the Lybian Desert called Burg al Arab (Arab Tower). I was taken to the goat pen where I [from The Stranger is Me] stood as the workers proudly hauled out their hybrids so Nagi could explain to us their physical differences. Typically, as with many of the government facilities we visited in Egypt, there were the usual superfluous number of workers, many of whom appeared to have little if anything to do but stand around and smile. So it seemed that nearly each goat had its own personal attendant, that would proudly pose them for our inspection as though this were some wacky satire on a snobby dog show in Scarsdale.
I discovered that if I took a photo of one worker-goat combo, another combo would approach to pose. On my last shot one worker was trying to get his quite young kid to stop suckling from underneath a larger goat, but it kept dashing back to it before I could get the shot framed. It was then that I noticed that the larger goat’s long coat obscured that it was in fact a ram, not a ewe. Noticing my pause the little goat’s handler came toward me, broadly smiling with badly stained teeth. I’m not sure I wasn’t being set up for this little display, since I noticed a couple other workers chuckling.
“Big goat is man goat, not lady goat. Maybe little goat is ho-mo-sex-u-al, yes?” he offered, stifling an urge to laugh. I thought of a couple of sheep jokes, but held off when the guy winked at me. Who knows what else they do for laughs and thrills in a town with a phallic name and is full of mostly guys ‘n goats.
My final Egyptian vignette also involves goats. Later, at a Bedouin settlement further into the desert I was steered to a tent to witness the birth of one of the hybrid goats they called “supergoats.”
When we peered into the tent I wasn’t all that surprised to see the herder assisting in the birth of a supergoat. There were several others gathered around, seeming to take more than the usual interest in what must be a rather commonplace event in these parts. But what did surprise me—even after the previous day’s little demo in goat alternative lifestyles—was that the herder doing the delivery was wearing a dress! It was one of those, what I call, “English lady dresses,” rather 1940s-ish, with the obligatory flower print, in this case large red and blue flowers.
Nobody seemed to be making much of his curious appearance. I tried to hold onto the hypothesis that perhaps he threw this little frock on when making deliveries to keep from getting his clothes soiled. After all, his hair was close-cropped and curly; there was no purse or matching pumps in sight, nothing to conclude that I was in the tent of “Ahmed, Queen of the Desert.”
“He always wears lady clothes,” Dr. Nagi, the ag specialist with me, said. “He likes the ones with flowers, and he says they are cooler than other clothes in the desert.” I had to admit that in many respects the design of a dress was not all that different from the galabiyya worn by many Egyptian men. In fact it was getting hot enough in this desert that I would have slipped into a sequined strapless prom frock with petticoat if it could have cooled me off a few degrees.
“That’s how fashion trends get started,” I replied, not having a clue what would be an appropriate response.
“But he is not a man who goes with other men,” Nagi quickly interjected. “He has a woman, two daughters, and a son,” he informed me, as though this was a Bedouin version of the Cleavers. Naturally, I immediately wondered what must happen when they all want to wear the same dress. “There’s his boy, Mahmoud, over there,” Nagi said, pointing to a boy of about six kicking a dusty soccer ball against one of the buildings, “handsome boy.” The boy was wearing shorts.
“I hope he can fight some,” I mumbled almost inaudibly.
It seems that that kid’s contemporaries can fight some. At least they have decided that the only way they are going to get a fair chance is to get the last pharaoh out of their way and try to install a democracy that isn’t the political version of a 3 card monty. Propped up by thirty years of American military aid, it might not be all that easy to get Mubarak to go. And, if so, will those Americans be willing to take some of the action away from our defense contractors and help build some infrastructure and promote some investment?
Egypt is a big sandbox with a green stripe down the middle. Egypt is pretty much the Nile. For a long time its economy has been mostly based on showing tourists the monuments and temples that the real Egyptians (different from the Arab peoples who now occupy the place) built, although it has a textile and some heavy industry, and of course, goats. But Turkey, with a like population, has an economy ten times larger. There are a lot of unemployed (over 20 percent), and underemployed Egyptians; not just poor, uneducated, people, but a lot of people with educations and advanced degrees. I mention Turkey in particular because it has managed, with the assistance of its army, to remain a secular government. It’s a lot to get done. Stage one, the Tahrir uprising, is still in process. Just succeeding at that could put smiles back on those Egyptian faces.
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© 2011, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 2.9.2011)