Who will leave my Collection of Books related to Egypt?

A farewell to: Mekkawi Said. Cairo Swan Song. Translated by Adam Talib. Cairo, New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2009. (First published in Arabic in 2006 as Taghridat al bag'a (تغريدة البجعة) 

Actually, this farewell started with a present which I got shortly before christmas 2021. A friend who had visited me in Cairo some years ago, thought of me when he heard about the German translation of Nadia Wassef's book "Shelf Life. Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller". He bought a copy of "Jeden Tag blättert das Schicksal eine Seite um. Mein abenteuerliches Leben als Buchhändlerin in Kairo" and I liked the book very much. It brought back some Egypt memories to me, as the first Diwan bookstore which she had co-founded with her sister and a friend was just around the corner of my flat in Cairo. I still love to go there when I am in Cairo...

So, this book has to remain with me, at least for some years. But I already have about a meter of books related to Egypt, and "Homecoming. Sixty Years of Egyptian Short Stories", selected and translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, did not find a place there yet, either. 

 

One has to leave! I decide to give "Homecoming" to Maria, a friend I met in Cairo. As I read the short stories more than a year ago, the book first changes place from the storage compartment of the coffee table to my bed for another reading before I say goodbye to it. I start with the first story, "Secrets", by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, and I appreciate the story as I did the first time, with all its bizarre and well described details of Bulbul following Abduh to adventures in a city suburb. Or were these adventures just imagined? As a good short story does, there is a lot of room for speculations and reflections. I open the book randomly and find myself with "A Small White Mouse" of Salwa Bakr. The protagonist, Husneya, tries to make money by telling fortune with the help of a white mouse. When there is a police raid, and the mouse is taken from her, she is afraid to tell Uncle Hasan, the owner of the mouse, about it. She thinks, "... she would lose him forever from the moment she reached the house and told him she had lost his means of earning his daily bread and had allowed the government to make off with the mouse." She does not need to tell him in the end...

So many good authors, so many good stories! Additionally, I should consider that the book was brought to me from Cairo by my husband upon his sister's recommendation. And if I ever managed to work with literature or culture again, I would especially miss such stories. Conclusion: This book has to stay with me.

What to do now? I almost feel as if I deprived Maria from the great collection of Egyptian short stories. Finally, I decide to separate from a novel which I bought myself. Mekkawi Said's "Cairo Swan Song" will leave the top of the cupboard that hosts my meter of books related to Egypt. I hope, Maria will like it. I remember how I started reading it right after having bought it at a branch of Diwan bookstore on Cairo airport, and how I immersed myself in the story of Mustafa who gives lessons to foreign students, has an on-and-off American girlfriend and an on-and-off affair with an Egyptian girl. He gets involved in screenwriting and other arrangements around a movie project of his American girlfriend, and in a lot of other activities that always seem to remain unfinished. Mustafa, who narrates the story, is a rather peculiar guy living in a rather weird Cairo inbetween arts and drugs, fundamentalist Islam and cosmopolitan shallowness. The blurb describes the story like this:

"Alienated from a corrupt and corrupting society, Mustafa watches as the Cairo he cherishes crumbles around him. The men and women of the city struggle to find lovers worthy of their love and causes worthy of their sacrifice in a country that no longer deserves their loyalty. The children in the streets wait for the adults to take notice. And the foreigners can always leave."

For me, the picture of Cairo drawn in "Cairo Swan Song" contains a few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that Cairo was for me. The pieces show cutouts from the multi-perspective, multi-cultural, yet all-embracing and both generous and demanding Cairo before the revolution. I will miss this novel on the extension of my bookshelf, as I miss some half-assembled puzzle pieces of my Cairene life. This jigsaw puzzle was and will always remain patchy. Maybe it is characteristic for a Cairo puzzle that neither the focus nor all the puzzle pieces needed to complete it are available.

Drafted by Andrea Ghoneim.

I chose to write this text in English as the book is in English and as I wanted to share it with friends who don't read German. However, it became obvious that I am not used to draft such texts in a foreign language. I keep thinking of elaborating a German version of it...