Shifting Streets and a Thousand Rumors: On "The Book of Cairo"

The Book of Cairo: A City In Short Fiction | Edited by Raph Cormack | Comma Press | 2019 | 144 Pages

Cairo—a sprawling city of more than 20 million people—has at least as many jokes, secrets, and rumors. While a small percentage of Cairenes stay in walled compounds at the city’s edges, places with names like Swan Lake and La Rose, most struggle to make their way through the city’s ever-changing core. The 2019 anthology The Book of Cairo is full of these shifting streets, where people hide their secrets among a thousand rumors: manufactured by the government, by nosy neighbors, by snarky co-workers, or even by services that specialize in rumor production.

The Book of Cairo, edited by Raphael Cormack, is part of an anthology series from Comma Press that collages together portraits of cities around the world. There have been two previous Arab city-anthologies: The Book of Gaza (2014), edited by author Atef Abu Saif and The Book of Khartoum (2016), edited by Cormack and Max Schmookler. While these earlier books gave broad overviews of their cities’ fictions, The Book of Cairo is very much a young book, built not from work by twentieth-century greats like Naguib Mahfouz and Latifa al-Zayyat, but from the rising stars of the twenty-first: Ahmed Naji, Eman Abdelrahim, Nael Eltoukhy.

In part, this is a book of despair: all but one of its stories were published after 2013, the year Abdelfattah al-Sisi came to power. But the stories are also full of the black humor, drug culture, and vibrant noise that underlie much of contemporary Egyptian fiction, in styles that range from a hardboiled realism to a flowing, tragicomic surrealism.

The collection starts off with Mohamed Salah al-Azab’s “Gridlock,” translated by Adam Talib. The pacing of this story echoes the rhythms of Cairo traffic: occasionally smooth, with frequent detours, and a lot of stop-and-go. Each of the characters is struggling through the mega-city’s traffic while trying to preserve their dignity and dreams.

All the main characters end up stuck together on Ahmed Abdel-Aziz St. One is a microbus driver nicknamed “The Dose,” who had a bogus spliff for breakfast (mostly aspirin and henna) and knows he should’ve spent the money on his baby daughter. Another is the driver of a Chevy Optra, bought on credit by the fastidious Hussein, who is hanging onto his middle-class identity by the skin of his teeth. Young Asma should be at university, but instead is sitting in the back of “The Dose”’s microbus with a boy, half-reluctantly kissing him. Meanwhile her father, a street-sweeper, is knocking on car windows, miming hunger, stretching out a hand for money.

No one is watching the road: Hussein is checking WhatsApp; “The Dose” is watching Asma and her beau; and suddenly all their secrets collide:

“‘The Dose’ rear-ends Hussein.

Hussein’s mobile falls to the floor.

Abdel-Rasul turns to see what happened.

Sherif takes his lips off Asma’s.

Abdel-Rasul and Asma lock eyes. She sees him begging in the street, he sees her in Sherif’s embrace.

‘The Dose’ and Hussein both leap out of their vehicles.

Let the battle begin.”

The crashing end of this story is also a darkly funny beginning. Like many of the stories in The Book of Cairo, it takes us on a loop, from one struggle into another.

Hatem Hafez’s “Whine,” translated by Cormack, is particularly recursive. This Egyptian office comedy opens after our protagonist has been made Head of Department. He sits in his new solitary office, realizing how much he misses “the warmth afforded by a large shared office teeming with government employees, all making their amiable commotion.” When he thinks about this “amiable commotion,” he remembers Kamel, who made fun of the previous Head of Office, mimicking the whine of his voice.

But wait, our kind protagonist thinks. Is Kamel now mimicking him? “The idea stung him in a sensitive spot, and, all of a sudden, he leapt up and flung open the door to his large office.”

As our protagonist struggles to make this new identity his own, he grows more and more paranoid. He tries to rearrange the office, only to discover rotted wood and faded patches of carpet. In the end, he puts everything back just as it was and decides to call poor Kamel into his office and humiliate him, as the previous Head of Department once did to him.

Mohamed Kheir’s darkly comic “Talk,” translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, is circular in a different way. A physician loses his livelihood when rumors about him appear in the press. The newspapers all report that he forgot a pair of scissors in a patient’s stomach—but, he protests, he isn’t even a surgeon, and he doesn’t do operations! After his wife leaves him, the doctor decides to track down the source of the rumor. Yet when he finally pulls back the curtain, what he finds is yet another curtain.

The rumor was invented not by an enraged enemy, but by a service provider. This rumormonger-for-hire tells him that the story may not be true, but the physician has made other mistakes: “Haven’t you ever diagnosed something as a simple stomachache, for example, when it turned out to be much more serious?’” As it happens, the rumor-service was hired because the doctor’s real malpractice wouldn’t have been juicy enough to attract public interest.

The rumormonger-for-hire convinces the physician that there is no point in tracking down the person who hired him. After all, his enemy is now the rumors themselves, which both obscure and reveal him. Instead of finding the source of the rumor, the rumormonger urges him to hire yet another service—one that specializes in rumor-dispelling.

Nahla Karam’s anti-romantic comedy, “The Other Balcony,” takes place between balconies, another public-private space. The story, translated by Andrew Leber, starts out with an inter-balcony romance and ends when the young man is disillusioned by seeing our narrator without her mask of well-groomed femininity. In the end, he starts his seductions all over, with a new girl. Our narrator sees him buying clothespins: “For some time after he left, I wondered why he needed the clothes pegs if he’d stopped throwing messages down to me – and started to wonder what the other balcony in his apartment might look down on.”

Egyptian stories are also known for their humor and transgressive vulgarities, and Ahmed Naji’s relentless “Siniora,” translated by Elisabeth Jaquette, does not disappoint. The story was published in 2017, just after Naji was released from prison, where he’d been serving a sentence for violating “public decency.” An excerpt of his novel, Using Life (2014), had appeared in the magazine Akhbar al-Adab, and apparently the depiction of sex and drugs gave one reader blood-pressure problems. In “Siniora,” Naji is as fearless as ever. The narrator tells us that “this isn’t going to be a romantic, erotic, or pornographic story,” although a lot of time is spent describing his girlfriend’s vagina.

But the story’s engine is not eroticism, but rather the fragility and delicacy of human relationships. The narrator tries to have a respectable life: “We broke up for a while, and I got a job as a salesman at a phone shop. I bought a car with a loan from the bank, put my energy towards building a successful life, made a new group of friends, learned to dance, and got into a car accident.” But when he wakes up from his accident, the narrator realizes he doesn’t want that life. He goes back to the girlfriend, and they enter the hash business together. It’s no longer a romantic relationship, “But I couldn’t lose that pleasure, ephemeral as it was, so I didn’t get too close or try to touch her.”

When “Siniora”-brand hash appears on the market, the government wages a war against it: “newspapers dedicated whole pages to the drug they called ‘Siniora.’” Meanwhile, the Egyptian public is in love: “One man, after his third hit of the joint, said: ‘Siniora has come to save the world.’”

The girlfriend is elusive after her success. She returns to our narrator, just once, for one more ecstatic night. After that, the narrator calls a police detective and starts stamping the hash in his apartment “Siniora,” apparently planning to sacrifice himself, “dreaming of long walls and filthy surroundings.”

Naji’s bleak love story does not take us to a new beginning. Instead it ends in a space of darkness, one with “no room for hope or dreams,” which may reflect Naji’s feelings about prison and certainly reflects many people’s feelings about Cairo in 2020.

The Book of Cairo ends, aptly, with Areej Gamal’s “An Alternative Guide to Getting Lost,” translated by Yasmine Seale, in which a young woman moves in a never-ending loop in search of a visa. So much about Cairo in 2020 seems to be stuck in just such a loop. And still, these authors also find a way to let their characters breathe, transgress, fight, and joke.

There are relatively few anthologies of Arabic short stories in translation, and most of these are teaching anthologies, created not for pleasure, but to give undergrads an experience of “the Arab world.” By having The Book of Cairo in a series that contains not only The Book of Khartoum, but also The Book of Newcastle and The Book of Sheffield, Comma Press creates a shared space where short stories can talk to each other across languages and literary histories. The next in the series is The Book of Shanghai; it will be interesting to see how these stories, from China’s largest city, will echo and jar against stories from Cairo.