Yasseen's Blog: Despatches from Wujdan

A Prayer for ‘Om El Dunya’

‘Twas brillig’ on Monday, May 6.

I love Sham El Nessim, the festival for everybody!

You go out in the very early morning for a picnic on the Monday after the Egyptian Easter Sunday.

Go to the Cairo Zoo, to the Alexandria Corniche, to the banks of the Nile in any town as far south as Aswan and you’ll find hundreds of thousands of people having breakfast in the open air.

Who are they?

Egyptians of all walks of life.

What do they eat? The picnic fare is usually boiled eggs, the shells dyed in bright colours, spring onions, fisseekh, a special salted fish for the occasion, mish, a rather pungent cheese and aish balady, unleavened, whole-wheat bread.

Sham El Nessim, which means something like ‘sniffing the breeze,’ is the Ancient Egyptian spring festival with which the legend of the resurrection of Osiris is associated.

Osiris’s brother Seth had envied him his popularity and murdered him, hiding his body. Osiris’s sister-wife Isis found the body and hid it. But Seth struck again, stealing the body from her and this time dismembering it and scattering the parts throughout the country.

Undeterred, the faithful Isis searched for them, found them, put them together and restored Osiris to life, bringing spring back to the world.

I regard the day as one of solidarity with all my fellow citizens of ‘Om El Dunya,’ the Mother of the World, as we like to call Egypt. For, as a relic of our very ancient past, it belongs to everybody regardless of their religion and I like that.

Then, it reminds me of the history of the world’s oldest national state and makes me wonder how things were in ancient times.

Sham El Nessim is always “brillig” for me. Remember? “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe...” I don’t know what Lewis Carroll meant, but whenever his word “brillig” comes to mind I remember the rest of the phrase and I see in the mind’s eye saucers of golden light shimmying on the surface of the Nile

This time, though, I must say, the day was tinged with sadness, thinking of the young people who have died since the revolution began.

My blog has lain fallow for a long time. I guess many must think that I am pretty hopeless at the game. I don’t dispute that. But, in my own defence, I must say I’ve been in a well nigh paralytic shock since January 2011.

There was one day early in the Midan El Tahrir Revolution, that a personal ‘darkness at noon’ befell me. I was, at the time, teaching a journalism class and had sat waiting from 9am till midday for the students to turn up. Nobody came and a tiny newspaper filler I had read some years previously about a prank played on a teacher sprang to mind.

It had made me laugh whenever I thought of it. I had, of course, never imagined that one day I might become the target of such an escapade. But on this day, as I waited for the students, I struggled with the awful thought that perhaps they were fed up with me.

The story told of a university professor whose students found him a crashing bore. On entering his lecture theatre one day, he found all but one of them leaving. Then, as he began his lecture, the solitary student ran round the room, turned on a dozen or so tape recorders on the benches and left.

A couple of days later the professor had to deliver another lecture to the same class. He went early and again found his students leaving their tape recorders and departing.

But this time he had come prepared and he turned on a tape recorder he had brought with him to deliver his lecture and left even before the lone student had finished his job of turning on all the recorders.

Had I, I wondered, become so tedious? Perhaps my students were too polite to think of tape-recording me but had decided to boycott the lecture.

So I was greatly relieved to find a full class the next time I had a teaching session. They explained that the time before there had been a demonstration which had blocked the road to the university.

As the term progressed, however, there were mysterious absences. Certain students had been involved in demos and for one reason or another couldn’t come to school. Once I was told so-and-so had been injured; another time so-and-so had been detained.

One lad, arriving late one day, suddenly frowned hard and clutched his forehead. He had, it turned out, birdshot or bits of shrapnel in his head that the medics couldn’t remove. The injury gave him spasmodic headaches.

These students, though, were the lucky ones. The true shock—one that has escalated day by day—has been delivered by the price in blood so many have paid. Some 2,000, at least, have died throughout the two-years-plus of the revolution.

Who killed these people? There are accusations and counter-accusations. There have been inquiries and inquests and trials but little has emerged from it all.

Rumour has it, meanwhile, that we have transited from a dictatorship to a democracy; which should mean that we are in an era in which there is an agreement to disagree. Remember Voltaire?"

I disagree strongly with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

There is, however, mighty little evidence that such a miracle has occurred and I would like to place on record my profound admiration for those risking so much—broken bones, blindness by birdshot and their very lives—to ensure that ordinary Egyptians have a say in their government.I would be with them, but I am not of an age to join in demonstrations.

My days of “Jack be nimble/ Jack be quick/ Jack jump over the candlestick” have ended. I can only pray that it will soon be recognised here, as it is in democracies worldwide, that peaceful demonstrations are an institutionalised part of the democratic system.

I was in a demo once, more than 50 years ago in an English university town. A number of students from various countries in Africa and Asia, some of which were then colonies in the British Empire, wanted to demonstrate against Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s Suez adventure of 1956.

I happened to be the secretary of the university student union’s Afro-Asian Society and, along with other student society officials, had to contact the police on the matter.We explained at the police station that we wanted to walk in silent procession through the town and return to the university campus carrying placards which read: “HANDS OFF EGYPT!”

The police were perfectly affable and readily gave permission. We would , they said, be the first to demonstrate in the town since Sir Oswald Mosley’s Black Shirts had goose-stepped through it before World War II. They mapped out a route for us to take and, on the day, police constables stood guard along it.

On the day, we started off from the university as a relatively small band of both foreign and British students, but our ranks swelled considerably as we proceeded. Numbers of townspeople joined us. Most notable amongst them were several mums pushing prams

On our return to the students’ union, various student officials delivered speeches for and against the attack on Suez to an audience of approximately 5,000 gathered in the union’s great hall. The students then voted for or against the military action and voting slips were gathered at the door as the students left the hall. An overwhelming majority was against the attack on Egypt.

Similar demonstrations followed by votes that gave similar results took place throughout the universities in the UK and must have served to influence the government of the day.

I am not saying that all went off absolutely swimmingly. There was a certain amount of violence.

In Hungary at the time, a students’ demonstration against the communist government had sparked a revolution that threatened Soviet control of Eastern Europe. This inspired a Hungarian student at my university to lash out at a counter-demonstrator who had torn off one of our posters. He knocked the man to the ground and jumped up and down on him, shouting: “England eez democracy!”

We had to pull him away, help the victim to his feet and take him into the union to gather his senses before we set out for the town.

On the route, moreover, counter-demonstrators threw thunder-flashes (extreme fireworks that make a loud bang and give a bright flash of light, used in military training exercises) at us over the heads of the police despite the presence of mothers and babies. At the end of the demo I was in a cold sweat over the thought of what would have happened to a baby if a thunder flash had landed under the hood of a pram and I swore never again to have anything to do with politics or demos.We were fortunate, I think, not to have had casualties.

Nothing to do with humans can, I suppose, be perfect. There is a need here, however, to recognise that democracy enshrines the right to disagree with a government and to demonstrate, albeit peacefully, against a government. There is even a country where the constitution allows for the collection of a certain number of signatures on a petition against a law or government project to oblige the government to abolish the law or abandon the project.

When will we have something of the sort?

Okay, sneer: “Foreign ideas! Too idealistic! Imagine asking the police for permission to demonstrate!”

What is wrong with useful foreign ideas? The West hasn’t ever had any hang-ups about adopting Middle Eastern ideas. Much of Western civilisation is based on ideas from Ancient Egypt and today people there are sampling Middle Eastern food with relish. Sandwiches with taheena,hummus, felafel or shawearma fillings are readily available in many Western cities today.

Millions of people here drive motorcars, commute on trains and buses, watch television, use computers and are daily on the internet, firing off emails, tweeting on Twitter and facing off on Facebook.

We didn’t invent cars, trains, TVs, computers, the internet and on-line social networks, but we use them.

And what is wrong with being idealistic

The revolutionaries of 2011 are demanding the democratic freedoms that millions in many other countries enjoy.
All I am saying is that for those to take root, officialdom needs to develop an entirely new outlook. And the idea of agreeing to disagree is far from foreign to Egypt.

In many other parts of the world when two men quarrel in public the crowd that gathers often encourages the men to fight.

“Go on! Give him one!”
“Great! Lay into him!"

But here an astounding non-violent spirit of conciliation prevails.

Not often, but on more than one occasion, as I walked through the city on my way to work, I came across men quarrelling vehemently and working themselves up to come to blows. As soon as the disputants reached out to grapple each other, however, men from the crowd would throw themselves between them and stop the fight

A signal example of this occurred one day in Sherif Pasha Street. Two enraged men had stripped down to their under vests and were facing off, fists raised when one suddenly turned to the crowd and shouted: “Is nobody going to stop me from bashing this chap!”

Volunteers were quick to thrust themselves between the two while I cracked up.

I pray that answers are found in this spirit that cries out for conciliatory—rather than forceful---intervention and that it eventually permeates political debate.

A Good Book

You don’t get much of a chance to read for pleasure these days if you live in Cairo, but I turned off the TV and the political cackle for awhile. I let the newspapers pile up at the front door and burrowed into the woodwork , so to speak, with what turned out to be a good book.

An Agoraphobic’s Guide to Hollywood: How Michael Jackson Got Me Out of the House by Darlene Craviotto is a memoir published as an E-book on Amazon Kindle. It is as fast paced as a thriller and delivers surprises worthy of a Knut Hamsun novel.

Another name for the book could be “Courage.” Think of it: you spend years working towards a career goal and then, just as you are about to arrive, it vanishes. What do you do?

The author, was about to co-star in a Hollywood movie when her driver crashed her car. Her face was so badly injured she couldn’t keep her first appointment with the cameras. The surgeons did a fine job restoring her looks. But then she found the accident had left her with a terror of the outdoors. Panic struck at the thought of leaving home.

Ever tried arguing yourself out of an irrational fear? For me, a futile exercise. “Avoid embarrassment and spare me possible cardiac arrest,” I now tell friends and tour guides. “Don’t try to entice me to the top of that tower. I don’t want a panoramic view of the city.” You can avoid towers. But how can you get to work with agoraphobia?

The young actress turned herself into a successful screen writer, managing to hide her “little issue,” as her agent called her agoraphobia, from a heartless, opportunistic Hollywood society. For, had it become known, it might have harmed her chances of being hired by the studios. Fortunately, a writer’s work is mostly done at home and she eventually became practised at finding ways to avoid non-essential meetings beyond the safety of home.

The story is about the author’s efforts to overcome her disability and write a script based on J.M. Barrie’s story of Peter Pan for a film directed by the demanding Steven Spielberg. Part of her brief was to consult Michael Jackson, who would be playing Peter, and make sure he was happy with her approach to the film. That, on its own, required an excruciating effort on her part. First, she had to get to him, which meant a nerve-jangling ride in a car there and back. Then she had to meld in with his mood and draw him out on his ideas for the film.

One suspects Michael—who performed with such panache before thousands but was extremely bashful in the company of a few--would have foiled the efforts of countless psychobabble merchants. But Darlene, with her own troubles to keep on a tight rein, somehow managed to work with him.

They were lucky. They had both been fond of Barrie’s story in their childhood. Michael, indeed, was so passionate about it that he had created his own millionaire’s interpretation of Barrie’s Neverland round him at his ranch of that name.

Darlene’s memoir is an inspiring story written by someone with grit. What happens in the end? The author calls it “A Surprise Ending.” I shan’t say what and spoil the story. But if what happened to Darlene had happened to me in my younger days, I’m sure I’d have been up before a judge over some volcanic public demo.

Darlene Craviotto deserves a medal for forbearance. Her book is that medal. I look forward to reading more by this author.

The Road to Wujdan

I’ve been away a long time. Put it down to anxiety because that’s what it was. When I was a kid, the BBC had a humorous series called, “Much Binding in the Marsh.” I didn’t understand the title then. I think I do now and there’s way too much binding in the political marshes in Cairo these days. Stops one from thinking. Today I decided to do something about it. Actually, I decided last night as I put my head down to sleep. “I am 11 years old again,” I told myself, “and tomorrow I’m leaving for Wujdan.”

Why 11 years old? Because that was how old I was when I learnt how to get to Wujdan. It started with learning how to get up at 5am without using an alarm clock.

Whenever the family had to go on a long car journey, my mum would want my brother and me to get up at five in the morning. Early morning journeys didn’t agree with me. I was okay for driving around at any other time of day, but early morning drives brought on motion sickness. It got so that as soon as the alarm clock rang I woke ready nauseated for the trip. So, what I did was to hit my head on the pillow five times and say, “I’ll get up at five.” And that’s what happened. I’d wake up at exactly five and slam down the bell on top of the clock just as it started to ring.

I don’t remember who or what put me on to this trick. It certainly wasn’t Alroy. Alroy isn’t really full of great advice.... It could have been Pericles, our gardener. But I can’t say for sure.

Eventually, after I had been through the pillow banging bit and woken at 5 am a number of times, waking up at a precise time became a doddle. Many years later I used the trick to wish away a wart that had appeared on the forefinger of my right hand.

My mum, who was a doctor, had removed it with an electric spoon but it came back again and she removed it once more. When it returned for the third time I whispered it away as my head lay on my pillow. It took a week to disappear, but, after that, it didn’t return.

More years passed. I had started smoking when I was eleven, sneaking cigarettes out of my mum’s packets. I eventually became a chain-smoker. Then, years later, a heart attack hit a friend who also chain-smoked. It panicked me. I began whispering to my pillow again. I said things like,” I do not smoke” and then, more positively, “I have taken up non-smoking.”

Self-suggestion brought the number of cigarettes I smoked down, from 80 a day to about 20. But I wanted to stop really quickly and cheated. I found a Chinese doctor who cured me of the habit in five days by acupuncturing my earlobes.

My pillow-whispering experiences, however, led me to Wujdan by way of pleasant semi-waking dreams. Perhaps my trip there was akin in some way to Alice’s experience of falling own a rabbit hole, but I didn’t feel myself to be falling, still less to be in a hole. I would find I was in a small house with an internal garden full of flowering shrubs. I would be sitting in front of an enormous picture window, a table between me and the window with my computer on it and I’d be wittering away at a story.

That translated into reality when I had had my morning shower and got down to doing my stint of producing, or trying to produce, a daily quota of five or six written pages however nonsensical their content.

Am I nuts? Definitely, I’m at least half nuts. In hindsight, I laugh over much that was hurtful to me in life. There seems to be nothing else to do. Perforce of the greying locks and deepening lines of creeping decrepitude, one abandons the stance of the angry young man and laughs. Which seems to me an acceptable way to move ahead in life. But nothing, so far, has explained to me why I have a desire to try to reproduce on paper so much that was, after all, well nigh a horror show.

I do not even pretend to know the answer to that. But let me say in my defense of wanting to write that the scenery that enters my head when I do write and eventually surrounds me, blending perfectly with the objective scene, is more than beguiling. It calms my frequent panic attacks.

Wujdan is an amalgam of places I have visited and fallen in love with. At the centre is Granada surrounded by the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada, whose mountain passes take me to other places for a change of scenery. Southwards, I walk on marl white roads under the green hush of bamboo naves in Jamaica’s St Elizabeth Parish and swim at Montego Bay’s Doctor’s Cave.

South East, I visit Jalali and Moroni, the guardians of Muscat’s sickle moon bay and journey to Yitti’s pink lagoon of flamingos.

When summer temperatures rise to unbearable heights, I sometimes catch glimpses of children skating on the lakes round Oslo.

Then, as dusk falls, I return to Wujdan’s entry point at El Ayn El Sukhna on Egypt’s African coast with views of Gebal El Galala (Majesty Mountain) inland and out across the Red Sea to the Sinai desert.

It’s a good place to write. Nobody knows you are there. So the doorbell doesn’t ring, neither does the telephone. Nobody knows the number.

How do you eat if you spend the day writing and you happen to be the family cook? Easy. You have three slow-cookers (crock pots) going at it while you write. One contains the beans for several Egyptian breakfasts. That one you plug in on the terrace so that the smell of cooking fava beans, not a pleasant one, wafts away to sea.

The other two you plug in anywhere convenient. One cooks the rice and the other a somewhat exotic dish of stewed leg of lamb. I’ll share the recipe with you next time.

That way you only interrupt what you are doing in order to turn off the rice when it is cooked and to make a salad.

Alroy

Of course it was Alroy’s fault, but in the end—and the end was many, many years later ---I was glad of what happened that afternoon because I got a story out of it and, eventually, more than one.

Great Aunt Consuela told me about Alroy. She didn’t actually introduce us or even name him. As a matter of fact she was pretty vague about how she knew him.

She’d been married to an Irish police inspector in the colonial service, visited the Emerald Isle with him regularly on holiday and was into all things Irish. She was a widow, when I knew her, but the Inspector remained very much alive for her. She consulted him constantly in one mysterious way or another. His “going over,” as she put it, seemed no obstacle to his talking to her.

Ireland and its folklore came to life for me when she spoke of them. The Banshee wept audibly for her before bad news reached her of one of her friends, and she had what appeared to be an uneasy relationship with Leprechauns. She would, I thought, when I grew up, have made a superb copywriter for the Irish tourist business.

“The Leprechauns,” she said, “are cobblers by trade and are fond of gold. Sometimes they can warn you, or give you good advice. But they can be wicked, you know. Not really wicked-wicked. Tricky-wicked. They can cause trouble.”

“What do they look like?”

“Little old men about three feet tall. They turn up here in the rainy season. They wear very old fashioned clothes: red jacket, red knee breeches, black stockings and buckle shoes. You shouldn’t try to catch them. They’re suspicious of humans, but you can talk to them.”

‘Here’ was Jamaica.

Shortly after she said that I went down with a bout of fever and when it had run its course, my Mother left me in the care of the owner of a guest house in the countryside to recuperate. I kept getting malaria and must have stayed at every country house on the island. It was always excruciatingly boring. They never had books any normal person would want to read and I had read most of mine and only ever had no more than one to take with me on those exiles from home.

This particular house had a straw table on the veranda piled high with murder magazines. One morning before breakfast I leafed through one of them and found a story of an elaborate murder plot that apparently hadn’t worked. There was a picture of a bomb hanging on a rope under a bed over a jar of acid. The victim, had there been one, needed only to get into bed to weigh the bomb down into the acid to make it explode.

I didn’t want to read the story. The guest house was a gloomy, old plantation ‘great house’ that now took in guests and needed no assistance to give me the creeps. I dashed out into the garden, climbed over the wall at the back of the house and made off into the woods which were dripping wet from rain in the night.

Alroy, which was what he said his name was, seemed to be expecting me. I knew him immediately, red suit and all. He even had red hair! There he was, sitting under a tree in the blue-green-pink light of a rainbow that sprang up to the sky through the trees from near his feet.

“How is your aunt and where is she?” he asked.

“She’s in Montego Bay. How do you know her?”

“She’s a friend of the Little People,” he said.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came for the Captain’s gold.”

“What captain?”

“Old Sir Henry’s. He has no use for it now...”

“Sir Henry?”

“Yes. Sir Henry Morgan. And what are you doing here?”

I told him and I told him how awful things were and that I wanted to go home.

“Easy,” he said and winked. He it was who put me up to the idea of knocking back half a dozen peppers or so. (You can read the story I’ve posted to see what happened. It is, of course, a fiction. But it is firmly based on the reality of my eating peppers and a hurricane that I thoroughly enjoyed as a small boy.)

Since that first meeting, Alroy has shown up again more than once, though not exactly in the same place. I don’t summon him. He sometimes turns up when I visit my home in Wujdan, a tiny house with an inner garden and a view of snow-topped mountains on one side and the sea on the other. I go there when I want to think about something serious, or when I want to write. Where is it? You may well ask. It is in a country that lies somewhere between Egypt’s Red Sea and Jamaica’s Ocho Rios.

Alroy likes the garden. I guess he must climb over the roof to get in. I have never seen him coming or going. He has taught me some interesting things. But I’ve learnt to watch my step when he gives advice with a wink.